The Fork in the Power Protection Road
When I took over purchasing for our 75-person office in 2020, I didn't think much about surge protection. We had power strips under every desk—the kind you buy in bulk from an office supply catalog. They worked fine. Mostly.
Then our IT manager showed me a fried switch that had cost us $1,400 to replace. The culprit? A surge that came through the building's main line, not the wall outlet. That's when I started comparing two approaches: the strip-on-every-desk method we'd been using versus Eaton whole house surge protection at the panel level.
Note: I'm an admin buyer, not an electrician. What follows is what I've learned from managing about $80,000 annually in electrical and facilities purchases across 8 vendors, plus conversations with our facilities engineer.
Here’s the breakdown of how these two approaches stack up across the dimensions that matter most to someone managing a corporate budget.