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From what I've read about this, it's not a very effective method of protecting individual items. It's only designed to stop very large surges and will not protect against smaller ones or things like brownouts.
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And you undoubtably read about this from a manufacturer or vendor that sells point of use devices.
If you've read any of my posts on this matter, you'll find that I advocate a two prong approach for those looking to protect themselves.
1) Whole house
2) Modest units placed where you think they'll do the most good.
To the above, I'll add a third item and that's seeing that your home or renter's insurance has provisions for equipment replacement (full value, not prorated) in the event of electrical damage. Usually you get addtional protection as part of the package: water damage, theft, accident, etc. As to whether you want to do this, that's up to you, but it doesn't hurt to ask the questions, get some quotes, and shop around.
Quite the contrary, a whole house unit is vastly superior with regards to protecting individual items by virtue that it grounds the surge before it can get into the building. A surge is a high energy, relatively short duration, violent electrical event. It is not a simple raising of voltage or current hence I've no idea what you mean by a small surge. An overvoltage is not a surge. A surge looks to ground itself anyway it can. Once it enters your house, then it remains to be seen what path it will follow in order to reach earth ground. It
may go back down the ground wire, jump wires, ground itself via the toaster, microwave, that nice $1000+ electronic washing machine you just bought, your computer, phone, clock radio, microwave, where you're charging your cell phone, etc. Its entirely unpredictable. Hence if you've installed a point of use device to "protect" your HT system, you've left everything else in your home vulnerable. Why not just lock the door to your house instead of relying on a gun in one room to protect everything, no?
You see, to a surge, a ground wire looks entirely different from earth ground because that ground wire is now a relatively high impedance device. That's the beauty of whole house because properly installed, ground is invariably 10 feet or less away. Any reputable company that markets protection against surges is going to stress, if not hammer at you, the
IMPORTANCE of earth ground. Further, any facility that knows what its doing is going to have facility wide surge protection in it. They may well have additional point of use devices, but no one is going to rely solely upon those.
As far as brownouts go, that's another matter entirely. If you've got a problem with those, then you need to look into the reasons. There's been more than one instance where a person's problems with their home can be traced to a problem outside that's the responsibility of the electrical company or some kind of wiring problem within the house. With all matters, you define your problems, assess your individual paranoia quotient, and you choose your solutions. For a point of use device, I happen to favor those that use Silicon Avalanche Diodes which some call transorbs. But that's just me. I've also got a few el-cheapo, believe it or not, $1 in the wheel barrow dumping ground at Home Depot units that I plugged in things like my dishwasher, microwave, and a few other things. This all works in conjunction with a whole house unit.
I've got no idea who builds Monster's units but I'd hazard to say they source them from overseas. A point of use surge protector is a pretty simple device. I don't have much faith in those warranties Stephen as careful inspection of them will indicate that it's a fair market replacement. As I mentioned earlier, insurance is something to investigate. Who knows, you might be looking forward to a surge then 10 years from now. Upgrade time my friend!
I'm not going to lose any sleep if you buy a Monster unit. I figure if some additional information is given to you, from someone that doesn't have an axe to grind, then you can use that information to make an informed shopping decision that works for you.
