Electrical Safety Tips for Cold Weather Power Surges

When the cold winter weather settles in with freezing temperatures, your heating bills naturally rise. One other thing that increases is your risk of experiencing power surges that can damage your electronics. Electrical systems are under a heavier strain due to increased demand during the winter months. By understanding why power surges happen, we can inform you how to best protect your home from them.

Why Power Surges Happen More in the Winter

There are several reasons that power surges are more common during the winter months than at any other time of the year. The most obvious one is the increased energy demand. Homeowners rely heavily on their HVAC system, holiday lighting, space heaters, and other electronics. This puts a larger strain on your local electrical grid and can lead to load fluctuations that cause power surges.

Another cause of wintertime power surges is poor weather conditions. Snowstorms, strong winds, and ice accumulation can lead to power line and transformer damage. Once your utility company restores the damage after an outage, there’s typically a sudden spike in electricity. This power surge can be damaging to your home’s appliances and sensitive electronics.

If you have aging electrical system components, the cold weather can expose their weaknesses. Problems like outdated panels, old wiring, and loose connections can all get worse during the winter. This is because materials will contract due to the cold temperatures. This increases electrical resistance and the chance of experiencing voltage irregularities.

One other well-known cause of power surges during the winter is space heaters. While space heaters can be great for adding extra heat to areas of your home that are cold, they do require a lot of electricity to function. If you’re plugging space heaters into an existing electrical circuit that is already near the brink of overload, you’re likely going to cause a power surge.

Whole-Home Surge Protectors

When most homeowners hear the term “surge protector,” they picture a power strip with built-in surge protection. While these can be helpful to protect sensitive electronics like your television, they can’t protect your entire home. This is where a whole-home surge protection device comes into play.

These devices get installed right at your electrical panel box to protect all the wiring coming into your home. This means that your entire electrical system, all your circuits, and everything plugged into them are protected.

Whole-home surge protectors work by diverting excess energy to your home’s grounding system. They have a built-in threshold, which is the amount of energy that must be traveling through the line before they divert it. Whenever energy exceeds the threshold during a power surge, excess energy gets diverted to your home’s grounding system. This ensures that it is safely dispersed into the ground and doesn’t run through your electronics and electrical system components.

Schedule Routine Inspections

A good way to promote optimal system safety during the winter is to get a professional electrical inspection. We recommend scheduling one in the fall to prepare your system for the upcoming winter.

When our electricians do a thorough inspection of your system, they’ll be able to identify any problem areas. These could be things like outdated wiring, overloaded electrical circuits, or other issues. By repairing these problems during the inspection, we can greatly reduce your risk of experiencing damage due to power surges.

Update Outdated Electrical Components

If you have outdated electrical components in your home, you’re putting yourself at a higher risk of experiencing damage during a power surge. It’s best to update any outdated or corroded wiring to prepare your home for the colder temperatures. Our electricians can let you know if there are any such components in your electrical system when we do our inspection.

If you have a home that was built before the 1980s, you may not have a full 200 amps of power coming into it. Two hundred amps is the modern-day standard for powering all of our appliances and electronics. Unfortunately, if you only have between 60 and 100 amps of power coming into your home, it’s likely that your system is already on the brink.

All it may take is the increased demand in winter to overload your electrical circuits. Upgrading your panel box to accommodate a more modern 200 amps of power is ideal.

Reliable Electrical Inspection Services

Hometown Plumbing, Electrical, and HVAC offers reliable electrical inspection services for the Johnson City, TN community. We can also assist with all of your electrical repair, installation, and replacement needs. Call our office today to schedule your next service appointment with one of our licensed electricians.