Dangers Of Electrical Storms

Just thought I'd throw in my personal experience.

Had a bad, bad electrical storm pop up out of nowhere and didn't think anything of it.

Then a bolt apparently hit near by. The screen on our TV in the den turned funny (rainbowy colors), then our router, modem, and two PC wouldn't work (the network cards that is, not the whole PC).

So I wound up replacing two network cards ($10, no biggy), one wireless Linksys router, and one modem.

My old CRT monitor was smoking everytime I turned it on after a storm....needless to say, I kept it.

How safe is wireless with storms? I don't hard wire any of my computers including my desktop and imac which are right next to my router. It's just another cable taking clutter

Anything that transmits radio waves is a lightning magnet. However unless your running your equipment outside you should be reasonably safe. Still when I see the lightnining charged green and red monster headed my way I not only turn off my computers I unplug them from the wall socket as well.

my dads old comp(p3 800mhz and 300mb ish ram)got completely fried due to a lightning strike

the psu had a hudge black mark in it and everything that was hooked up to it got pwned

he unplugs his stuff because he has a 1000$ speaker set hooked up(i whold probly spend 10,000$ for speakers like these)and a buntch of other stuff

i wonder why nothing eles got fried.....

$1000.


Wow.

After reading some of these, I have to add mine as well. I used to have a MSI K8n NEO4 board (think that's what it was). Anyway, a few weeks ago, we had a storm come thru my neck of the woods here in Florida. The wife n I were out having dinner when it came up, and didn't get home in time. Got home, and all the clocks were doing their flash dance needing to be reset, 2 circuits in the breaker box were thrown, and my computer wouldn't turn on. Got the breakers back on, reset the clocks, but the computer still wouldn't come on. It was plugged into one of those 'cheap' $20 Power Surge Protectors, which ain't worth a dang. Took it to my local shop, and they got it down to a fried mobo. Replaced it with the MSI K8N Diamond Plus, (and since I was there) added another gig of memory, and upgraded the video card to the 7900 GT CO. AND, bought a 500va APC, which has already paid for itself, cause we had another storm come thru a couple days ago, power flickered, but this time, I was able to shut down the computer and unplug everything before anything got toasted.
Plus, after getting the computer back home, it wouldn't connect to the internet, even tho it has 2 ethernet connectors on the mobo. Called Brighthouse (my supplier), and they determined that the storm had also knocked out the NIC in my cable modem. They had me hook up the usb from my printer to the modem and it worked, so I went out and got another usb cable for the printer. They don't want me to turn in the modem, since it still works via the usb.

Hooking up your cable modem via USB makes it slower than ethernet cable, BTW.

countermods said:

i have a monster cable surge protector up to $100000 is what it will inshure up to i wont use any thing but that surge protector paid $200 had a storm here in syracuse ny a few years back and it saved my comp my projector stereo pretty much my wholew entertainment center love it

Click to expand...

Funny- I have one of those 10K warranties too. Storm last night toasted my scanner system.

Since I had to replace the battery at 1 year, the company says the warranty is invalid.

Good news- I'm out a computer.

Lightning Damage

My dad went for a service call where the house was struck by a lighning bolt.
It hit the Sat dish followed the cable down to the Ground block (cable ground connector)
Vapourized the ground wire/block and blew chunks of siding 30 feet away. where the ground stake was the 8" cement block was blown apart. If I can get him to send me the photos I will post them.

Im actually waiting for one to kill my POS dell so then i have an excuse to build a computer

lightning fried my modem

This is what happend to me 2 days ago. I was surfing online after a thunderstorm had moved to the north of me. The thunder was mostly gone when a rouge lightning strike hit behind my house. The whole back yard lit up that bright yellow. Electricity flashed on and off a couple of times then stayed on the tv got staticky but didnt go off. The computer didnt go off but the connection was lost.

Tried to reconnect and it said no dial tone but the phone worked. After trying a different pci slot I put in a different modem and it worked. I retried the old one and it still wouldnt work. It showed up in device manager as working properly. There wwere no visible signs of damage to the modem/burn marks.
My neighbor had a lightbulb explode when it hit.

Luckily I have a Tripp Lite Line Stabilizer / Conditioner LC 1800 that my computer/monitor/printer are powerd by. I think it may have saved my system.

I dont think a surge supressor would stop a lightning strike power surge.

This is what it does. These are used mostly on servers.

Model #: LC1800
Premium automatic voltage regulation (AVR), power conditioning and AC surge suppression
Maintains regulated 120V nominal output over an input range of 89 to 147
1800 watt / 15A maximum capacity
6 NEMA 5-15R outlets, 6 foot AC cord
LEDs display incoming voltage range, surge suppression and line fault status

MY next question is How do I protect my modem?

athlonhead said:

Tried to reconnect and it said no dial tone but the phone worked. After trying a different pci slot I put in a different modem and it worked. I retried the old one and it still wouldnt work. It showed up in device manager as working properly. There wwere no visible signs of damage to the modem/burn marks.
My neighbor had a lightbulb explode when it hit.

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This happens several times a year to my folks usually, I think the telco has some problems or nothing is grounded correctly because anytime a storm even gets close enough so you can hear the thunder, if they don't unplug the modem, it get killed, same as yours, no visible damage and they show up to the computer but they just stop working. They try to unplug whenever a storm nears but sometimes they aren't around or it gets zapped before they get a chance, so I always keep a few modems on hand just in case.

athlonhead said:

This is what happend to me 2 days ago. I was surfing online after a thunderstorm had moved to the north of me. The thunder was mostly gone when a rouge lightning strike hit behind my house. The whole back yard lit up that bright yellow. Electricity flashed on and off a couple of times then stayed on the tv got staticky but didnt go off. The computer didnt go off but the connection was lost.

Tried to reconnect and it said no dial tone but the phone worked. After trying a different pci slot I put in a different modem and it worked. I retried the old one and it still wouldnt work. It showed up in device manager as working properly. There wwere no visible signs of damage to the modem/burn marks.
My neighbor had a lightbulb explode when it hit.

Luckily I have a Tripp Lite Line Stabilizer / Conditioner LC 1800 that my computer/monitor/printer are powerd by. I think it may have saved my system.

I dont think a surge supressor would stop a lightning strike power surge.

This is what it does. These are used mostly on servers.

Model #: LC1800
Premium automatic voltage regulation (AVR), power conditioning and AC surge suppression
Maintains regulated 120V nominal output over an input range of 89 to 147
1800 watt / 15A maximum capacity
6 NEMA 5-15R outlets, 6 foot AC cord
LEDs display incoming voltage range, surge suppression and line fault status

MY next question is How do I protect my modem?

Click to expand...

The only sure way to protect a modem from lightning is to disconnect it from the phone line during a lightning storm and power down the computer. Even your power conditioner won't stop a close strike or a strike to the power lines (even miles away). There is too much energy in a lightning strike for anything but a heavy guage wire path to ground. That's why you see lightning rods on top of farmer's barns.

SURGE=BULLSH**T

BROWNOUT=$20 UPS

UNPLUG=NOOBKILLER TD

Hope that helps. From a guy with absolutely ****ty brown power in his house.

athlonhead said:

This is what happend to me 2 days ago. I was surfing online after a thunderstorm had moved to the north of me. The thunder was mostly gone when a rouge lightning strike hit behind my house. The whole back yard lit up that bright yellow. Electricity flashed on and off a couple of times then stayed on the tv got staticky but didnt go off. The computer didnt go off but the connection was lost.

Tried to reconnect and it said no dial tone but the phone worked. After trying a different pci slot I put in a different modem and it worked. I retried the old one and it still wouldnt work. It showed up in device manager as working properly. There wwere no visible signs of damage to the modem/burn marks.

Click to expand...

The same thing occurred with a US Robotics 5699B 56k modem back in 2004, probably in May.
That was after a T-storm, even when there wasn't any lightning bolts that close!

Even when the telephone line wasn't dead, Windows gave me the dreaded "There was no dial tone" (or similar) error message. Also, it wasn't visibly damaged.

It still was listed in Device Manager and Windows said "The device is working properly." (or similar)

But months later, I decided to try the modem again. Guess what, Windows that time didn't refuse to dial, but it acted possessed, Windows would display 115,200 kbps instead of the real bandwidth, then when it appeared to be fine, the web browser failed to access *any* web site, it would act like it was being blocked by my firewall, but the firewall was fine, it would say that the web site don't exist for *all* web sites or all of the web sites just failed to respond. Thus I disconnected then tried to redial again. When I did, Windows was back to the dreaded "There was no dial tone" error message. (or similar) It was strange that it would find a dial tone then it can't.

Not electrical storm but other power outage

Hi there,
I have a laptop and also a Planar monitor hooked up to it and all in a power surge protector and yes I had heard you still are not safe.
What heppened to me though was everything was on and I was in another room. A vehicle hit an electric pole with a transformer on it just outside my house. We were without power for about 12 hours. When it came back on my laptop was OK but my Planar monitor will not come back on. No light or anything. It is the one with the power brick and they cost like $70 so I just wonder can anyone be pretty sure this is what it is before I spend the money. If it could be something else I would rather not spend the money.
Thanks
globalgrl

Here's an example of why you might rather fear your house burning down than losing your equipment! Fortunately it didn't, but I've learned to use better UPS's or preferably, unplug it all....

I've burnt out 2 routers and a net port due to lighting storms.

thought I'd support this thread, just little under a month ago a fierce lightning storm took out my brother's old PC, a modem, a printer, a electrical fence power supply, a few meters of electrical wire, half the damn telephone line and one very unfortunate tree!

Thankfully I didn't take any risk with my brand new 1800 euro computer and unplugged it, I just wish my brother did the same to his old pentium 4, now it's toast

Don't take any risks with lightning storms, unplug your computer and your modem/router/printer!

Have a safe lightshow

edit: forgot to mention, the computer, printer and modem where all connected to a surge-protector, it was a cheapo one I'll give you that, but I still wouldn't take the risk even with a proper one.