Question about punch down panel surge protectors. Help?

So I don’t know a ton about phone systems. But at my job I’ve been tasked with occasionally fixing some phones. And by fixing phones, the problem I have to handle a lot is that our business phones stop working, I put a toner in the outlet, then go find the punch down with a wand.

From there the punch down panel goes across a board with a corresponding 5-pin gas tube surge protector. And then the other side of the board has a mirrored set of punch downs that goes to either another board near it or another building on our campus.

The way I was taught to deal with this was to find the punch downs and replace the surge protectors. I often do this alone so there is no way for me to know if I’ve fixed the problem without going back across campus. So people before me just replaced any surge block related to that line.

The issue is that across multiple buildings, one line can have around 4 blocks associated with it. The people before me just replace them all. However, they’re tossing aside 4 blocks to replace 1 blown surge protector every time. So we’re blowing through these things and I’m told to just use blocks not being used. There are only so many of them.

This system seems very inefficient. Is this what other people do? There has to be a way to test these surge protectors to know which ones are blown. Because 3/4 of the ones thrown in the “bad” pile are probably fine.

I’ve just tried to start recording information about which lines correspond to which punch downs because it wasn’t done before me. But the whole process is tedious and I just wanted to know if there is a better way. Is there a way to find out which of these blocks are blown and which were just thrown aside and are fine without having to plug them in and get someone to test the phone lines? Is there are better way to fix a line that having to change every surge protector and go across campus and test the phone?

Maybe this is just how it goes but it seems very inefficient. Especially the part where people have been tossing aside 4 surge protectors to fix and single blown one. Thanks ahead for any help anyone can offer.