That's because you think your electronics consist of your laptop and your TV set. But just about all your expensive stuff is electrical, if not electronic. Things like your refrigerator, your washer and dryer, your microwave oven, kitchen appliances, telephones, air conditioner(s), ceiling fans, maybe a pump, a water heater, even light bulbs can add up if you are using LEDs or compact fluorescents. Just sitting at my computer hutch, I can add up over $4,500 worth of stuff that I can reach out and touch without getting out of my chair, stuff that would be absolutely destroyed by an extreme power surge. Add another couple thousand dollars for things that are only intermittently connected to chargers -- iphone, camera, shaver, ipad, Kindle(s), etc, and don't forget the TV set and DVD player. Then, if I scoot my chair over about five feet, my wife's computer hutch holds another two or three thousand dollars worth. [My wife and I each have our own computer systems because of our difference of religion: She's Macintosh, I'm Windows.]

More than once I have heard horror stories about electric company linemen working on the power lines. They make a mistake and send 440 volts down the lines to the local houses that are supposed to getting 220V, and the destruction is awesome, costing the electric company hundreds of thousands of dollars in compensation up and down the neighborhood.

I dunno. Perhaps the fact that in over five years here I have not had a problem is an indication that I don't need to worry. Or, perhaps I have just been lucky.

tanstaafl.