Whole-home surge protection used to be an easy skip: houses held little electronics worth protecting and the device was one more line on a quote. Both halves of that changed, and in a province that loses power to weather as often as this one, the arithmetic now leans the other way.
What actually surges
The dramatic version, lightning somewhere near the lines, is real but rare. The common version is domestic and constant: every large motor in and around your house, the heat pump, the well pump, the dryer, sends small voltage spikes through the wiring as it starts and stops, dozens of times a day. And the Nova Scotia special: outage-and-restore cycles, because restoration is precisely when switching transients ride in from the grid.
Small surges do not kill electronics on day one. They age them, the way potholes age a car, and the failure arrives later, unexplained, out of warranty.
What stands behind your panel now
The reason whole-home surge protection stopped being optional is what houses contain now: a heat pump with a control board, an induction range, an EV charger, a connected furnace, and every screen in the building. The expensive victims are the hardwired ones, which no power bar can stand in front of.
When it is genuinely worth it
If the house runs a heat pump, a well pump or a charger, yes. If you live where restore cycles are a season sport, along the shore or up the long rural lines, more yes. And if a panel upgrade is already booked, it is the cheapest this device will ever be to add, because the panel is open anyway. The honest skip: a small house with little hardwired electronics and stable power, where a couple of good plug-in protectors cover what matters.
The surge protection install itself is short.