Storm wiped out the whole team

[Admiral Akmir]

Man, I feel terrible right now. Woke up this morning to a storm, lightning struck a house just down the block and caused some fires. Noticed there was no internet, figured there was an outage, went to work. Came home, still no internet, sat down to have a look and found the modem lights were all off even though it was plugged in. Tried to power cycle it, nothing, no lights at all. Went out, bought a new modem, called the ISP and gave them the MAC, found out that my Pfsense box had no lights on the WAN side at all, despite there being a verified connection. It looks like that storm wiped out both the modem and the little dedicated system board I had for Pfsense. I opened up the box and noticed a faint brown spot on one of the chips on the board. Almost like a small coffee stain. It's sad to see it go, I'm back to using a plain old consumer Linksys router flashed with DD-WRT.

Would a surge protector have protected the devices against a lightning strike? I assumed the power strip we had plugged in was a surge protector, but I'm thinking it wasn't after seeing both of those devices die at the same time. I've read that they don't protect against lightning strikes.

 

[dyckah]

im not sure how true it is, but i have heard that lightning strikes can send surges through telephone, cable, and ethernet lines.

 

[Jmtyra]

Sorry to hear about the outage, that's never any fun!

dyckah is correct, the surge from the lightning strike could have traversed the coax cable, telephone line or an ethernet cable. The surge protection device would need to protect both the power feed in addition to the coax/telephone/ethernet input from the ISP. Unfortunately, most of the consumer grade equipment for sale does not provide much protection, especially on the non-powered side (coax/telephone/ethernet).

 

[kyfire]

The Monster syrge protector I picked yp at Wally World has both coax and phone line protection. ASnd comes with a (IIRC) a $50k insurance againist damage to connected devices.

 

[TazExtreme3]

Lightning strike surges will definitely travel through coax or any other conductive cable if not properly grounded. I was a tech for a cable company for a while and seen plenty of lightning strikes absolutely disintegrate coax drops. When properly grounded (no more than 10 ft of 10AWG wire between ground block and ground rod), The electricity will safely pass to ground, usually with no damage to connected components in the house. The drop (at least in the cable biz) should absorb the strike completely. Lightning arrestors are available for coax, phone lines, etc. I highly recommend whole house surge protection as well, such as the APC SurgeArrest ("SurgeArrest will warn you if its circuitry has been damaged by heavy strike or power line surge and it is unable to provide 100% protection. If still under warranty (10 year warranty), APC will then replace your damaged SurgeArrest free of charge.")

Edit: Please do not connect the coax cable of your cable modem or phone mta to a "powerstrip surge protector", the noise levels introduced into a coax network are astronomical and will cause issues. Use coaxial inline surge suppressors/arrestors instead!

 

[Mr.Scott]

So as not to misinform, there is nothing you can buy that will 100% protect you from a lightning strike. Nothing clips fast enough. The only 100% method is isolation, meaning, physically unplug every single input line. Eg. Coax, power, ethernet, etc.

 

[Admiral Akmir]

Well, it's now suspected that the houses in my area aren't grounded properly. There have been two lightning strikes in the last two years within a block of my house. The fire marshal is involved and there's probably going to be an inspection. Scary stuff.

 

[RollingThunder]

So as not to misinform, there is nothing you can buy that will 100% protect you from a lightning strike. Nothing clips fast enough. The only 100% method is isolation, meaning, physically unplug every single input line. Eg. Coax, power, ethernet, etc.

Scotty,

This is correct. APC and similar home UPS units won't tolerate a direct hit or a very close
proximity hit. That's why I always watch the weather and just pull the coax lines / modem
if there is any chance of thunderstorms.

The modem re-ups with a reset in very little time.

 

[Jmtyra]

For the best protection, yes, unplug everything. That is the only 100% guarantee (except for a direct hit to the building, arching, etc).

Response (clip) time for a surge protection device assumes MOVs or another "consumable" technology and does not apply to always-on protection like series mode protection devices. However, that is only for the power side of the equation and doesn't help the coax/telephone/ethernet connections.

I suppose you could go 100% wireless and only risk frying the wireless AP/router, but that's still not cheap to replace.