Surge protectors

[#1]

Does anyone have any advice/experience of how effective these devices are?
I bought one a couple of years ago when an electrical spike trashed my PSU (fortunately no further damage). I am considering replacing it with one which has more (than 4) electrical sockets. I have seen some that also have telecoms sockets as well, but if I use this for my router it would mean using an extra phone cable between the router and master socket. With the router's transformer already plugged into the surge protector should this not provide adequate protection from electrical interference?

[#2]

You have the risk of a surge via the telephone line as well as via the mains power circuit, hence the inclusion of the surge protected telephone inlet/outlet.
Personally I wouldn't use a seperate surge protector for the telephone line into the router, but I don't have any real reason for this, other than anecdotal evidence suggesting that its not the best thing to add on an adsl line.
Where the phone line comes out of the splitter it may be tempting to use the surge protector to cover the phone handset.
IIRC there are spark gaps included into telecoms master sockets these days to protect against some spikes.

[#3]

how effective they are i wouldn't know as i still switch off at the mere threat of a thunderstorm.  i got an 8-socket belkin with three telephone inputs i don't use.  i'll brave it next thunderstorm and report back if anything got fritzed.

[#4]

You could have a look at something like this if you are after separate adsl line protection for your modem/router

[#5]

I only use one surge protector... so far in all my years of computing I've heard of more computers destroyed using them than those without!
What people forget is that surge protectors will only protect from mains spikes - Not against a bolt of lightening. It is just that, a SURGE protector. Lightening is something completely different.

[#6]

I use a UPS which gives protection against surges from both the mains and telephone line and against outages and brownouts. I always thought that brownouts were something just the US had, but I have had one recently and five outages in the past month.

[#7]

After three incidences of lightning damage I'm rather keen on phone line surge protection, however there are definitely some dos and donts, one of which I learned the hard way.
IMO mains spikes are not an issue for most people. I may be wrong here but IMO if your computer is fried from the PSU it was probably a PSU failure, loss of feedback/regulation will do it, two failures the same weekend seem to be linked to a capacitor getting hot and falling out.
IMO Phone line protection is the biggie, especially our area where much of the phone wire is overhead.
One gotcha is to remember that that block isn't connected to a really good earth so it really works by diverting the surge around the equipment. This only works if all the interconnected equipment is plugged into the same block. This especially goes for nonisolated ports like printers, serial and USB (Ethernet is a bit more "hard"). In my case I had the router and associated bits on one block, and computer on another. Unfortunately I left a serial test lead in and something jumped across, fried the router, hub, a "NETIOM" card and the computer's serial port.
The truely paranoid might want to use wireless and not have a cable from the router to the PC

The truely paranoid might want to use a wireless card in their computer and wireless