That is not exactly true. We did a lot of surge protection here in SW Florida with about 300 customers who were not going to turn off their machines and unplug them every time we had a thunderstorm and that is just about every day. in the summer. The article in EC&M said we have a couple hundred strikes per square mile every year in Florida. The surge will still get to that SPD down 18" of wire and stop it before it can go the 20-30 feet to the first piece of equipment you want to protect. The reality is most damage is caused by multiple ground and signal paths anyway. We fixed as much with bonding as we did with SPDs but we did take what was 2 or 3 calls a week down to a couple a year, usually on unprotected stuff. One thing we found out is a lot of "engineers" are wrong. Things they think they know don't pan out when the lightning strikes.
You do want to keep your wires as straight as possible on the SPD and GEC and put chokes in the ones feeding the equipment. We actually did that with Ferrite Beads but some folks swore tying a knot in the power cord worked.
