At election time it might be good to have some "power" humor.

We have a friend in White Rock who recently had a computer zapped by a power "outage", even though it was on a surge suppressor. That got us wondering how you can tell if a surge suppressor still works. In the search, we happened on this great (perhaps apocryphal) story.

"Here's a story: Back when I was doing power supplies one product needed a qualification test to see if it would safely isolate itself from the AC line for a fault. Isolation was achieved by using a huge (size of a frozen orange juice can) SCR to short the input and literally fuse the input wiring. Hey, the method was in the unit design spec for this military supply.

"So ... unit was wired up, fault simulated and ... the breaker in the power panel opened. So the unit was moved to the AC panel to the main breaker, the fault simulated and ... our entire company went dark till the main breaker was reset.

"So ... after some discussion the unit was connected before the main breaker to the power coming into the building. The fault was simulated and ... the whole town went dark for 3 hours.

"They didn't ask us and no one told.

"The unit was then redesigned with smaller wire. I am happy to say I was not involved with this effort, but I did get the afternoon off."

From https://forum.allaboutcircuits.com/threads/how-to-test-a-surge-supressor.73404/ by ErnieM.