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On a stormy evening, your lights flicker, the TV clicks off, and a moment later everything seems to come back like nothing happened. You might shrug it off as “just the power acting up” and move on with your night. What you do not see is what that quick jolt of power did to the electrical panel that quietly runs your entire home.
Those blips, along with nearby lightning strikes, brief outages on your street, or even your own HVAC kicking on, are often power surges. In a place with hot summers, strong storms, and a mix of older and newer homes, these voltage spikes add up. They can leave hidden damage inside your panel long before you smell burning plastic or lose a major appliance.
At Knee’s Electrical Service, we have been working on electrical panels in Marion homes since 1971. Over five decades, we have opened many panels after storms and utility events and seen the same surge “fingerprints” again and again. In this article, we will walk through how power surges behave in Marion, how they damage electrical panels, what signs you can watch for, and how whole home surge protection and panel care can keep your home safer.
Why Homes See More Power Surges Than You Think
A power surge is a short, sharp increase in voltage above the normal 120 or 240 volts that feeds your home. It can last for a tiny fraction of a second, but it delivers more electrical pressure than your wiring, breakers, and connected devices are designed to handle. Surges can be obvious, like a big flash and shutdown during a storm, or they can be small enough that you barely notice anything more than a single light flicker.
Weather is a major source of surges. Thunderstorms often move across Grant County quickly and nearby lightning strikes do not have to hit your house directly to spike voltage on power lines. When tree branches slap lines or wind brings lines together briefly, that can cause a surge that runs right down into your panel. Utility work, such as switching parts of the grid on and off after an outage, can also create surges as power is restored to larger areas at once.
Surges do not only come from outside. Large appliances in your own home, such as air conditioners, heat pumps, refrigerators, and well pumps, draw a heavy inrush of current every time they start. That sudden demand causes a quick voltage dip and rebound. In a home with older wiring or a panel that is already stressed, those internal surges can be harder on certain circuits and on the panel connections themselves.
Homes that have had circuits added over the years or that now support more electronics, HVAC, and kitchen loads than they were originally designed for are especially vulnerable. From our vantage point in the field, power surges are not rare one time events. They are a regular part of life on the local grid that quietly wear on your electrical system.
What Really Happens Inside Your Electrical Panel During a Surge
Your electrical panel is the heart of your home’s electrical system. Power from the utility enters the panel through the service conductors and passes through the main breaker. From there it lands on two metal strips called bus bars. Your branch circuit breakers clip onto these bus bars and send power out to different parts of the house. Neutral wires land on a neutral bar, and bare or green grounding wires land on a ground bar inside or near the panel.
When a power surge hits, that extra voltage does not politely bypass the panel. It slams into the same bus bars, breakers, and connections that handle your normal power. The higher pressure can cause electricity to jump across tiny gaps inside breakers or at the points where wires are clamped into lugs. This jumping, called arcing, creates intense heat in a very small area. Even if the arc is brief, it can pit metal surfaces and leave darkened or discolored spots that we often see during inspections.
The surge also strains the internal parts of your breakers. The tiny springs and contacts inside each breaker are sized for normal operation plus a safety margin. A strong surge can make these parts flex and heat up quickly. Repeated surges act like bending a paperclip back and forth. It may not snap the first time, but each bend leaves it weaker. In electrical terms, each surge can leave a breaker slightly less reliable at tripping when it should or more prone to nuisance tripping under normal loads.
Surges can also stress insulation around conductors and at terminations. The extra voltage and resulting heat can cause plastic and rubber materials to harden, crack, or discolor over time. In some panels we open after significant surge history, we find insulation near the main lugs that has turned brittle or shows slight melting. These are the kinds of changes that a homeowner cannot see from the outside, but they increase the risk of future arcing and overheating inside the panel.
How Power Surges Damage Electrical Panels Over Time
Many homeowners think of surge damage as a single dramatic event. A lightning strike hits nearby, something pops, and half the house goes dark. That can happen, but in our experience, the more common story is slow, cumulative damage from many smaller surges over months or years. Each surge leaves behind a little more wear, and eventually the panel starts to show symptoms that are easy to blame on “old age.”
Inside an older panel, repeated surges can gradually pit the surfaces of the bus bars where breakers clip on. Those tiny pits reduce the contact area, which increases electrical resistance at that point. More resistance means more heat every time current flows, even during normal operation. Over time, this extra heat can darken the metal, loosen the breaker’s grip, and make the problem worse. We have opened panels in basements where certain stab points on the bus bars are clearly more discolored than others, often corresponding to circuits that trip or fail more often.
Connections at lugs and neutral or ground bars can suffer similar damage. Surges can cause very slight movement at these points, especially if they were not tightened properly years ago. That movement can break the thin oxide layer on the metal and allow new oxidation to form. Oxidation increases resistance, which again causes more heat under normal loads. This cycle of heating and cooling, sometimes called thermal cycling, can eventually loosen screws and clamps even further, leaving conductors more prone to arcing.
Some panel brands and vintages commonly found in older homes also have less forgiving designs than modern equipment. They may have narrower bus bars, less robust breaker contacts, or aluminum bus material that is more sensitive to arcing and corrosion. Combined with aging grounding systems that may not provide a low resistance path for surges to dissipate, these panels can show surge related damage sooner. When we inspect older equipment, we do not just look at the date on the label. We look closely for these visible signs that surges have been beating up the panel for years.
Signs Your Electrical Panel May Have Suffered Surge Damage
Most homeowners will never remove a panel cover, and they should not. There are, however, several warning signs you can notice without touching anything. One of the strongest is smell. If you notice a hot, plastic, or burned odor around the panel, especially after a storm or power blip, that can indicate insulation or plastic breaker cases have been overheated. Buzzing, crackling, or sizzling sounds from the panel area are another serious red flag that electricity may be arcing inside.
Heat is another clue. The panel door and breaker handles should generally feel close to room temperature. If you lightly touch the outside of the panel and find that one area or a particular breaker feels noticeably warm compared to others, and especially if that follows a recent surge or outage, it is worth having a licensed electrician investigate. Heat on the outside often means more heat where you cannot see, at connections or bus bars inside.
There are also behavioral signs. If certain breakers start tripping more often after a big storm or power event, even when you are not doing anything new on that circuit, that can point to a weakened breaker or connection. Lights that dim or flicker when large appliances start, outlets in one part of the house losing power repeatedly, or electronics failing one by one over a few months can all be part of the same surge story. Each symptom on its own might be easy to ignore, but together they suggest surge stress on the system.
Any time you notice these signs, especially burning smells or crackling sounds, the safest move is to call a licensed electrician quickly. At Knee’s Electrical Service, every technician is background checked, drug tested, and carries the Technician Seal of Safety so you can feel confident about who is coming into your home to investigate a safety concern. We can safely remove the panel cover, check for discoloration, melted insulation, loose lugs, and other surge related damage, and then walk you through what we find.
Why Plug-In Surge Strips Are Not Enough for Homes
Many homeowners feel protected because their computers, TVs, or game systems are plugged into surge protector power strips. Those strips do provide some level of protection, and they are better than plugging sensitive electronics directly into the wall. However, they only protect what is plugged into them, and only against surges that reach that outlet through the hot and neutral conductors. They do not shield the panel itself or the rest of your home’s wiring.
A plug in surge strip typically contains small components that clamp voltage when it rises above a certain level, then divert the extra energy to the strip’s ground connection. That works locally for that receptacle, but a large surge can still enter your home on other circuits, or through other paths such as cable or phone lines. Your air conditioner, furnace, well pump, oven, and other hard wired equipment are not connected to that strip. They are still exposed to whatever comes in through the panel.
Even for the devices plugged into them, strips have limits. After enough surge events, their internal components can wear out and stop providing full protection, sometimes without any obvious indication to the homeowner. We have been called to homes where a customer lost a TV or computer during a storm even though it was plugged into a strip they thought was protecting it. The strip simply did not have the capacity to handle the surge that came through.
There is also the issue of where the surge is controlled. If you only clamp voltage at the outlet, every wire and connection between the panel and that outlet, including the breaker, bus bar, and branch wiring, has already seen the surge by the time the strip does its job. That is one of the reasons plug in strips are a good second layer for sensitive electronics, but they are not a substitute for protection at the panel where the power first enters your home.
How Whole Home Surge Protection Works With Your Electrical Panel
Whole home surge protection is installed at or near your main electrical panel, typically connected to the service conductors or the main breaker. A surge protective device, often called an SPD, monitors the voltage coming into your panel. When it senses a spike, it reacts very quickly and provides a low resistance path to your home’s grounding system. Instead of letting that extra energy travel through your breakers and branch circuits, it shunts it away toward the ground rods and other grounding electrodes.
Because it is located at the panel, a whole home SPD helps protect all the circuits downstream, including hard wired equipment like HVAC systems, pumps, built in appliances, and lighting. It does not stop every possible surge or guarantee that there will be no damage, especially in the case of a very close lightning strike, but it can significantly reduce the size of many surges that would otherwise reach your devices. You can think of it as a pressure relief valve at the point where electricity enters your home.
For a whole home SPD to work properly, it must be paired with a solid grounding and bonding system. The device relies on that grounding path to safely carry away the extra voltage. In many older homes, we find ground rods that are corroded, loose connections to water pipes, or grounding conductors that are undersized or damaged. In those cases, adding an SPD without correcting grounding issues is like putting a new storm drain on a clogged pipe. It may help, but not nearly as much as it should.
In our work, we often combine surge protective device installation with panel inspections and grounding upgrades. We explain how the SPD will be connected, what it can realistically protect against, and how it works together with point of use surge strips for especially sensitive electronics. The goal is for your panel, wiring, and protective devices to act as a team, rather than relying on a few power strips scattered around the house.
When Homeowners Should Consider Panel Repair or Upgrade
After a major storm or power event, it can be hard to know whether your panel needs attention or if everything is fine. As a general rule, any time you notice burning smells, crackling noises, or visible damage around the panel, it is time to call for an immediate inspection. Likewise, if you lose power to multiple rooms after a storm while neighbors seem fine, or if breakers will not reset and stay on, there may be internal damage that needs prompt attention.
There are also slower developing situations where a planned inspection makes sense. If your panel is several decades old, if it feels crowded with tandem breakers or added circuits, or if you have added significant loads such as a new HVAC system, hot tub, or workshop, it is wise to have an electrician evaluate both the panel capacity and its condition. Repeated nuisance tripping, unexplained flickering, or warm breaker handles can all be clues that surges and age have pushed the panel close to its limits.
In some cases, repairs may be enough. Replacing damaged breakers, re terminating overheated connections, and addressing obvious signs of arcing can restore safety for a panel that still has life left in it. In other situations, especially with very old equipment or bus bars that show widespread surge damage and discoloration, a full panel upgrade is the safer solution. When we evaluate a panel, we walk you through what we see and explain why we recommend a panel repair or replacement, so you can make an informed decision.
Panel work is also a natural time to look at surge protection and grounding. If you are investing in a new or upgraded panel, it often makes sense to add a whole home SPD and bring grounding and bonding up to current safety standards at the same time. This way, you are not just swapping an old panel for a new one, you are improving how your entire electrical system handles the surges that are part of life.
How Knee’s Electrical Service Protects Homes From Surge-Related Panel Damage
At Knee’s Electrical Service, our first step is to listen. When you call us about flickering lights, strange panel noises, or breaker problems after a storm, we take time to understand what you have experienced. During a panel inspection, our technicians perform a visual check for discoloration, melted insulation, loose lugs, and other signs that surges or heat have been at work. We may use testing tools to check breaker performance and look for voltage irregularities that point to deeper issues.
If we find problems, we explain them in plain language, often showing you photos of what we see inside the panel so you are not just taking our word for it. We discuss options that may include targeted repairs, panel upgrades, whole home surge protection, and improvements to grounding and bonding. Because we have served Marion and nearby communities since 1971, we are familiar with the types of panels and wiring common in local homes and how they respond to storms and utility events.
Every technician on our team is background checked, drug tested, and professionally trained, and we are proud to hold the Technician Seal of Safety. We respect your home by using protective gear, keeping our work area clean, and leaving the space as we found it. Our A+ BBB rating, Angi recognition, and HomeAdvisor Screened & Approved status reflect the way we approach every project, including safety critical work on electrical panels and surge protection.
If a surge or storm has you worried about your panel, or if you see any of the warning signs described here, you do not have to guess what is happening behind that metal door. We can help you understand the condition of your system and put a practical plan in place to protect your home. Call Knee's Electrical Service today to schedule an electrical panel and surge protection assessment.