Dangers Of Electrical Storms

[DaddyB]

Happy 5th birthday to this thread

Is this the longest running thread in OC history yet?

 

[Mathersalan]

Back in 1999 where I live there are a bunch of iron stone rocks alll in my yard.. I live in a small town middle of no where inside of an old house..I now live ina new house built down the road from it on my other property. We had some serious lighting storms every summar and it hit my setup it was a AMD K6..can't remmber the clock freq..gigabyte mobo..128mb ram 20 gb hdd fried everything up even the monitor.. Lighting was attacking the whole house killed all the coordless phones...I even saw a spark in the den from out of no where hitting the Alarm system. It even hit the eletrical fense going into the woods where there was a goat pin one time actually burnt up the socket inside the house where it was connected to. Phone lines for the house were damaged as well..When the phone guy came he said the panel to the phone thing was popped off a couple of feet away.. I was onlly 10 years old by my self at the time so.. yeah

This I will never forget!

 

[Twigglish]

I would rather see someone lose 2hrs "playtime" than a computer or worse and sadly its that time of year again

And Im just THAT lucky to live in the lightning capital of the world. Weeee....

 

[shirker]

Would daisy-chaining a bunch of surge protectors and UPS units together result in better lightning protection? I mean, if one good UPS can save your equipment from a minor surge, what could 5 or 10 of them do?

 

[WeaponX6X]

The Cat5 port of my laptop was fried a month ago from a lightning storm. It also took out a couple ports on my router. And yes I'm using an APC UPS...unfortunately there aren't ports to route a cat 5 cable through it

 

[Jayws]

Lol, simple solutions:

1. Live in an area that isn't known for it's tornado season/lightning storms (aka not the middle of the USA).

2. **** luck.

Storms don't get that bad here, it'd be some very small chance that I ever got hit and/or lost equipment in the process. (Whew...)

 

[WoW_STORM]

I do not unplug anything, ever. I have been through many many storms and only had one small problem with it in 20 years. My advice is make sure your insurance policy will cover what you have and keep it paid. Good luck to all and hope the STRIKE DOES NOT GET YOU.

 

[OC101]

Power surges from the power company > lighting

The power company in our area always blamed it on birds and squirrels. They never paid for any damage.

 

[Lolek]

About four, five years ago, when I still lived in NY, we had a pretty ugly storm go through. Long story short, lightning struck a giant oak (I think it was) on the property line beside my house.
One of the massive limbs on the thing blew off, and crashed down into my chimney, splitting it down almost to the roof.

How's this relate to computers?
Well, if it had been about two inches to the left, it would've plowed down--through the roof--and onto me and my setup. Luckily, no rigs were hramed in the making of this film.
Still, imagine my surprise when the telephone and TV cut out, but electricity is sitlll on; I walk outside, and there's a mass of leaves blocking my way off the porch. That was fun...

Anyway, no actual experiences with lightning shorting out computers or other electronics for me. Lucky, I guess?
--Lolek

 

[Strid]

I can add to this discussion what happened at my parents house this year. Lightning struck, and everything network related blew. ADSL router, switch and NIC in my brothers PC. The parent's PC's work were fortunately on wireless connection, so no harm there. Also my brother had his PSU fried. So no protection from a DSL versus phone-line connection.

ISP replaced the router free of charge, new switch came from my fathers work and I had a spare PSU lying around which I used to fix up the brother's PC, so luckily it didn't cost anything, but it really makes you think nextime there is a thunderstorm, hehe ...

 

[OC Detective]

Just had a major lightning strike hit my house a couple of weeks before xmas. The damage was extensive - took out the main circuit breaker in the house, the alarm system's user pads, control panel and many of the window sensors, my router and modem, my xbox and dlink media centre (linked by lan cable to the router), fried one of the LAN chips in my PC (it has 2) and several of the USB ports (though everything else is OK thankfully!) and took out a DVD player and several sets of xmas lights.
It also managed to damage my Wurlitzer OMT jukebox but luckily only blew 2 fuses on the main amplifier board as well as a treadmill I have!

 

[Th3 F4ll3n P1mp]

I never unplug. My surge protector has a 10k dollar waranty. If my 2000 rig blows up, I get cash and build a new one.

 

[iansmith]

One thing to watch out for if you are depending on a UPS or power strip warranty is make sure that EVERY connection to your machine is covered by something with a warranty.

If lightning fries your computer via your cable modem, good luck getting the maker of your UPS to pay if you didn't have the cable collcted to the UPS.

And as many have said before, no UPS or power strip will stop a lightning strike. It just came down through 10 miles of air, and a little inch sized supressor is going to stop that?

I think the chances of your computer being fried are pretty low. I bet it's a thousand times riskier to install new memory than to leave your machine on during a thunderstorm.

Times lightning fried my machine: 0
Times I fried my own machine: Umm.. several times.

 

[KrK]

Lightning can damage and destroy by induction

Lightning strikes are just bad news in general. You don't just have the surge from actual lightning strikes--- In my experience the power spikes causes by lightning induction does damage much more often. The phone lines or power lines or cable TV lines don't have to be hit---- the action of nearby lightning produces EM fields which causes power surges and spikes along cables and wiring.

It is my understanding that you could completely unplug your electronics--- power, network, Phone, etc and your PC (and other electronics) could still be damaged by EM fields generated by a nearby strike causing induction within the circuitry of the machine itself. I've heard reports of equipment in storage that is damaged by lightning nearby even though it was not a direct hit and the equipment wasn't plugged into any source of surging.

 

[KrK]

BTW anyone ever collected on those so-called UPS and surge warranties?

I remember reading the warranty once a few years back and it seemed like it wasn't worth the paper it was written on. I seemed to recall the small print said things like the surge suppressor must of actually had a flaw in it that allowed the damage blah blah and you had to send it back to them and the equipment for inspection and have your original receipt and so on and so forth .... 50 hoops to jump through before they actually honor their so called warranty claim.

Anyone ever collected on one?

 

[myststix]

Well to you modem users, I would recommend getting a wireless net workable modem. (That is a dial up wireless router, linksys made some, I had one by another company a while back.)

I game on my laptop all though storms, I just unplug the AC adapter. I got about 6 hours of juice, large main cell and extra battery module.

Get a good power condition/UPS and as was stated, make sure all your plugs are attached to it (phone, cable, etc).

 

[dark bishop]

oregon doesnt get lightnning that often, though we do get strong enough winds to nock out the internet and power.

 

[DiamondDave]

I'm not really a big-time expert on this topic, but I do know that lightning is actually ordinary static electricity ... except on a massive scale. As with any electricity, electrical current will always seek the shortest path to ground. I don't mean the shortest distance, necessarily - thinking in terms of electrical "path" the shortest path might be into a pole, across 150 feet of wire, and then down a metal tether to the ground. Of course, a lot of things (like people) have a certain amount of "ground" in them. Therefore, since that current is looking for the shortest path to ground, it will ground into you as much as you'll hold before it continues on the next closest ground (possibly using you as a conductor).

Other stuff has "ground" capacity as well, with some stuff being higher than others. I tested this once with a test light designed for checking the ground connections in standard household electrical outlets. Basically, you feed the red wire to you common side of the plug, and the black to the ground port on the plug. If the ground is good, the light lights up. If not, you get a dim light or no light at all. I got curious (and felt like pushing my luck), and I tried using different things around the house as a ground. I did take precautions to protect myself, such as wearing rubber insulated gloves, etc. Believe it or not, one of my frying pans had enough "ground" in it to power the little light, although dimly. (Yes, I took the common red wire and stuck it in the common side of an electical outlet, and ran the black wire to a metal frying pan sitting on my wooden countertop - not touching any other source of true ground.) The point I guess would be that while a lightning bolt might not run directly through your PC or TV or whatever, there might be other "pieces" of the original bolt that will divert to fry your other stuff while it looks for the quickest and shortest path to a source of "ground".

So, my advice would be to:

1) Unplug it if you don't want to take any chances - this includes all manner of wiring, phone, power, etc.

2) Ground your home and all wiring coming into the home as good as you can ... more ground points are better than one. Drive good long metal poles into several places around the house and run good thick guage wire to all your ground points. The idea is to create the most free-flowing electrical path to the ground. Hopefully, it'll help any surge or stray bolts find their way to ground. I actually wired a separate dedicated power line from my breaker box to where my PC is located. I also ran a separate dedicated ground wire just for that one outlet. (This was in addition to the normal ground that the rest of the house uses.) The wiring and related hardware actually cost me less than my UPS did, so it's not like I spent a fortune or anything.

and lastly,

3) Use a good surge / UPS combo that'll cover you for the surges you don't expect. (Like the ones that happen on clear days when there's not a hint of a storm in the sky.)

Again, I'm not a big expert, but I feel 99% accurate in what I've said here. Good luck!

 

[ok10min]

someone ran off the road and hit a pole down the road and it somehow sent a surge to my puter through my surge protector. PS, MB, CPU = toast....and that was on a sunny day

 

[myststix]

personally i just hate it when lightning knocks the power out, one night I actually had to break out the old Gameboy and try to play it by candle light...my eyes still hurt

Did you consider going to bed? *lol*