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Lightning damage?

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AcEmAsTr

Member
Joined
Oct 26, 2002
Location
Huntingdon UK
If lightning was too hit my house and i don't have a surge protector, what would fry? and would i be safe using it?
quite a bad storm here now, lightning ect... just curious
 
My attached garage got hit a few years ago, right at the power panel. I lost everything that ran on low volatage DC.

Phone machine
Doorbell
Motion Detector lights
Hot tub (hole in circuit board the size of a nickle)
Garage Door Opener
Cordless Phone

I did not have a PC at the time. But surprise was that the TV, VCR, Regrigerator, Microwave and Central Heating/Air were all ok even though no circuit breakers tripped.
 
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Im with ThePerfectCore, it has never happened to me, but I have heard some real nasty storys, wouldnt want my hard earned cash to go up into smoke.
 
eaglescouter said:
My attached garage got hit a few years ago, right at the power panel. I lost everything that ran on low volatage DC.

Phone machine
Doorbell
Motion Detector lights
Hot tub (hole in circuit board the size of a nickle)
Garage Door Opener
Cordless Phone

I did not have a PC at the time. But surprise was that the TV, VCR, Regrigerator, Microwave and Central Heating/Air were all ok even though no circuit breakers tripped.

TVs run on about 25,000 volts so I'm guessing it was glowing
 
I never unplug, nor do I turn off.

Hell, there was a storm here just about 30 minutes ago. Lightening struck a manhole cover just infront of my house and I never even flinched in my use of the PC :cool:
 
It varies:

I usually do not shut off my equipment unless the storm is very close.....last year I was getting lightning strikes in my neighborhood and I shut everything down and unplugged all my power cords.

Almost :(

We lost power and when the storm was past I went around restarting my machines- I found that I had missed on plug!
The surge managed to take out one cpu while not damaging anything else in the pc, somehow!?!?!?!?
But it was definitely dead.

I used to work with a guy who had a very near miss at his house: lost pc, stove refrigerator, TVs and virtually every other electric appliance in his home.

Just not worth the risk in my book.

I have a few thousand dollars in all my computer equipment all told and I would be lucky to get $1500 from my insurance: I unplug.
 
Don't play games with lightning. Even if you are protected
with a UPS it can get you. Things to watch out for are
phone lines or ethernet cables into your rig.

It may be a hassle, but shutdown and unplug is cheaper
than replace. With a close hit power strips don't help.

BUT, blowing your rig to hell with lightning can have an
upside. Two years ago I thought I could finish a report
during a storm. It came in over the phone line. I lost
the whole rig. The upside? I took this to mean that
Mother Nature wanted me to upgrade to a new machine. :D
 
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