When I was helping my late friend GB do residential HVAC work. Many customers in rural areas were having capacitors and circuit boards blown out in their HVAC systems here in Alabamastan. I got him to start installing hard wired surge arresters on the condensing unit and air handler to protect them, especially the very expensive control boards in the heat pumps. The new super duper high efficiency systems that used no more power than a night light were very expensive to repair when a power surge hit them. 5 years after I started installing hard wired surge arresters on residential HVAC systems, the hard wired surge arresters showed up in all the HVAC and refrigeration supply houses in the area. Before that, I had been installing them for many years on commercial systems and got them at electrical supply houses. Me and GB never had to replace another blown capacitor or circuit board for a rural customer who had us install the surge arresters. I know guys who will say, "I don't want to install protection, I want lighting to damage things so I can make more money fixing them." Of course when it hits a large area, many systems go down and the fellow can't get to them then the customer calls someone else and may never call him back again. ^_^
TDD