1:45am Saturday morning. Lightning storm. Flash and a boom instantly, no delay, first thought.... we just got hit.

Yep.

multiple circuit breakers tripped. one damaged beyond repair. smoke detectors started sounding a minute later..... nothing in the world is scarier than the sound of smoke detectors in the night.

Next morning. No power yet. fired up the generator and started checking things out.

casualty list to date:

1 DSL modem dead
1 hardware firewall dead
3 internet switches dead or damaged
1 computer won't connect to internet
1 computer and monitor dead. This one is my business machine.
1 Roku device dead
1 37" TV damaged. won't take any input
1 off air TV antenna amplifier dead'
1 circuit breaker dead
2 LED light strips dead
1 Phone hums.... but is still working.

Yep.... the line crew replacing the 2 transformers on our path said it was a direct hit to the high voltage wire. Fried both transformers.

Things that survived.

2 Magic Jack plus phone modules
1 Studio DAW and monitor. While connected to the power line, it was all turned off and no internet connection.

I spent all day getting as much back up as I could. Found a DSL modem exactly like I needed on the facebook market place and bought it immediately. That's how I'm here right now and on a brand new office computer. Monday I will get a SATA cable and transfer the data off my old HD..... or set up my Carbonite account on this machine and DL the files from the old machine. Reinstall biz software and go on with life.

Man.... it makes you look at thunder storms in a whole new light with a major hit like this. But.... on the plus side..... We did get a new 50" 4K UHD TV out of it.

Wow. That sucks.

That’s a shame.

A lightning strike on my neighbor’s tree five years ago took out some of my studio. The maddening thing is when the problems are intermittent, or develop after the insurance claim. Check EVERYTHING.

Also, I had just had the next-to-last rehearsal of my orchestra parts, and guess what burned up? My MIDI synth. Had to drive two hours to buy something that would get me running the next day so I could make adjustments.

Ouch!

Let's hope the age-old adage about it never striking twice in the same place is true.

Whoa, I am so sorry to hear about your loss. That had to have been really scary. Lightning strikes are cool to watch from afar but being up-close and personal with them ... my parents always told me to get off the computer during thunderstorms back when I lived in Ontario, and I never put much stock in it because I never saw bad results, and now that I live in Victoria I haven't seen a single thunderstorm in 5 years.

I'll be sure to make sure all my stuff is shut off next time a storm is expected to roll on through. Sorry to hear about all the damage.

Sorry to hear that. Hope you get things together ASAP. Glad nothing was set on fire.

It had to be even worse at that hour.

We had a direct hit on a tree 10 feet from the house years ago. It fried about everything electrical. The most remarkable aspect was that we had an amp unplugged expecting a big storm and it was still killed. We saw "blue light" running through the house along walls. Guess the electrical surge bled over to them.

Yep, scary as hell and like you we gained a new perspective.

Best to you,

Bud

Hi
Wow sorry to hear that must have been a pain.
Hi Ember . just shutting down may not do the job that sort of electrical charge can jump little switch contacts. You need to remove the plugs from the supply skts also disconnect your telephone line from your router etc or it will still get that via the phone line surge,
Then keep everything crossed that it does not run across the walls.
Stay lucky
Mike

What Mike said. In my event, charge ran through the Ethernet cables and took out equipment in rooms on the other side of the house.

Oh my - what a disaster!!!!

Sorry to hear of your loss. What a PITA it will be recovering gear and data.

I've been a musician all my life, but I did try two day gigs to see what normal was all about (while gigging on the weekends). I found out normal is sooooo overrated (for me).

Both these day gigs taught me to physically unplug my gear when I'm not using it. I'll leave it on all day, unless I leave the home. It gets unplugged before I go, and I unplug it before I go to sleep. When I am home, it also gets unplugged during thunderstorms.

I was a telephone repairman for a couple of years. The worst strike I saw was the phone wires from the pole to the phone empty of all copper, just a brittle line of plastic. The inside of the wall phone was melted, the metal flashing of the roof was melted to the hook where the phone wire attached, and there were two holes in the drywall ceiling above the bed in the bedroom. The lightning 'protector' was found on the fence in the back yard and there was a black line where the ground wire used to be.

I was also a Cable TV technician later engineer. I saw may cases where the lightning hit either the cable or the power and since both had slightly different ground connections, melted both the TV and Cable converter.

If lightning hits close, your gear will be toast.

I hook everything up to one power strip, and I plug the power strip into the UPS. Before leaving or retiring I turn everything off, then unplug the power strip from the UPS.

Sunny or stormy makes no difference, I just do it.

If you want your gear to be safe, I suggest you think about doing the same thing.

Insights and incites by Notes

Unfortunately lightning is unforgiving. I spent a considerable amount of my working life trying to design systems to cope with such events using fibre, optocoupling, varistors etc but that unfortunately is all too late for you.

Whilst you may have dead computers you might still have recoverable hard drives be sure to remove them and check them out.

Good Luck with the remaining replacement items Herb.

I'm still set up on additional coverage with Allstate for situations like lightning strikes for my PC and music gear. Unfortunately, I couldn't lump it into one coverage. They have my computer gear under "Electronic Data Processing Equipment" and all music gear under "Musical Instruments".

Even when I lived in Hobart which has an extremely low lightning rate I had surge protection on my comms equipment and PC. When I moved up to the Gold Coast I put surge protection on most of my power outlets including all computing equipment, tv, fridge, washing machine etc.

I was once asked by management “will the lightning protection work”. The simple answer is you won’t know unless it fails.

Tony

Sorry about all that damage but the main thing to remember is that you and your family did not get hurt.

Damn. As I've posted in other threads I just moved out of LA and up into the mountains 125 miles east. We have thunderstorms around here in the summer. I have a large hill directly behind my house that goes up to the clubhouse and I have a nice view from the front down into a small valley so I'm not on exposed high ground but still...

I'm taking all this to heart guys, thanks and good luck to you Herb and my condolences. In spite of the losses, the big thing is everybody's safe. Scary stuff I never had to think about in LA. Except for earthquakes which are just as common out here as they are there.

One thing you may not be aware of concerning common surge protectors. They have a limited life like a year maybe. It sucks I know but they should be replaced regularly. I can't remember where I read this but I think it was here posted by Mac. The problem is small surges that you may not know happened gradually weakens the surge protector until it fails but the problem is they still let power through, you still think they're working.

Bob

Expanding on Bob's thought, did you know many power strip surge protectors have a way to visually notify you when the device is no longer providing surge protection? It's the built-in light. When you first install the power stripe the light stays on solid when the power switch is on. As the electrical components degrade the light flickers. Once the flickering starts then your hardware is no longer protected.

Dang Herb,

That is horrible man. I hope you get it all sorted out and I am so sorry!

This kind of thing scares the living you know what out of me.

I have like 12 back up hard drives in a closet safe. I have backups of backups of backups.

Again, my heart goes out to you man!

Backups of backups gave me the idea to check out how large are thumb drives now. I had no idea:

Amazon flash drives

1TB for $15?? Wow. Granted these are USB2, USB3's are expensive but the 2's are fine for backup storage. No worrying about platter HD's getting damaged.

Bob

Bob, you got me excited about this. I could get a few 1TB thumb drives and use them as backups, replacing my HDs. That was until I started looking at the ratings. All that I looked at, and that was two pages worth, had between 50%-75% one star ratings. No thanx, I'll pass on these.

Agreed. I'm still using the USB External Hard Drives for backup. Very reliable and now 4TB are pretty good price.

According to the reviews, these cheap "1Tb" drives are smaller size thumb drives with faked capacities.

So they'll let you write a huge amount of files to them, but it won't actually be stored, so you'll just have a bunch of corrupted files on the drive once you get past the actual drive capacity.

Yes.... In the security business, we used a bunch of them on phone lines. That seemed to be how our panels were getting hit.

Most of the ones you buy in the stores, and even the ones we use in this biz are parallel surge devices. They go across the line to neutral or ground. The are good for one hit. When blown, you never know it and there's no efficient way to test them. They're like fuses. Test them and you have to replace them.

There are series surge protectors that are more expensive but you will know when it's blown because nothing downstream from it works.

Yes, small surges weaken the MOV's and eventually, even without a big hit, they have stopped protecting you. Some have lights on them, some (most) don't. And none of the low voltage ones do... phone, internet, comm circuits etc....

Fortunately, prices are way down on TVs and computers so we buy new ones and hope for the best with the surge protection in the lines. They are designed to get the small surges.

When lightning hits the lines directly, and blows the power company transformer on the pole ( 2 of them actually... us and the neighbor) there's nothing made by man that will stop that surge other than to be totally disconnected from the lines.

As I am writing this.... thunder is rolling outside.... let me shut this off and go into the house and take a nap. I think I'll pull the plugs.

Surge protectors won't work for a close lightning strike. Period.

The only sure protection is to unplug it.

When you aren't home, unplug it. Overnight, unplug it. When storms approach, unplug it.

It's the ounce of prevention.

Insights and incites by Notes

yep yep

you don't even have to get a hit to get hit. Magnetic Induction into the lines is just as bad.

Surge protectors might not work is probably more accurate. In the eighties we had a massive RS232 based network at a University I worked at (as the data comms guy). Every wire was protected by a varistor to ground at both the mainframe and terminal ends. All line drivers were optocoupled. We had a direct hit, in one area the wires blue off the termination modules varistors were fried we lost 3 terminals out of about 25 in one building.

The actual building that got hit didn’t have much in it but the building suffered. This building was close to the computer centre. The computer centre survived just fine.

In another case I was looking after the networks for a number of hospitals. I recommended using lightning protection particularly in one area. “Lightning protection does not work” I was told. They often had equipment failure after storms. The really bad thing they did was swing a cable in the air between buildings so yes induction played a huge part. After putting rather large black holes in a multiplexer they replaced the multiplexer still no lightning protector. Two weeks later a series of black holes in the new multiplexer @ $7k+. This time we also installed a $45 protector (that had to be replaced) but never had real bad issues again.

As I said earlier with any lightning protection you don’t know if it worked, you only know if it failed. I have many examples.

A lot of people put protection on power to PCs but not on the data cables. If you are going to do protection you need to also consider the comms devices.

In the years prior to my retirement I was responsible for the networking for some 300+ schools. I insisted that all cables between buildings were fibre. Once again purely as lightning and induction can be very dangerous.

These experiences come from 40+ years working in data comms. Like insurance some protection is better than none.

My thoughts

Tony

I always use surge protectors and uninterruptible power supplies.

But when I'm not at home, sleeping, or if I hear close thunder, it's unplugged.

Yes, there may be cases where the lightning finds a better path to ground that spares your computer, but that's like playing Russian Roulette with your hardware and your data.

Years ago I had lightning hit close to my house, it sent sparks out of the jack where the phone/DSL line connects to the wall, and toasted an APC UPS/Surge protector. The computer, unplugged was unharmed.

I was home, I saw the sparks, it was like independence day fireworks (the 'sparklers' that we used when I was a child).

Insights and incites by Notes

That sums it up quite succinctly.

Also, lots of usable information in this topic.

Interesting read. I'm sitting here between two or more typhoons over Japan, China and the Philippines. Just returned from the Philippines where Manila is more like Venice without anything nice and in Hong Kong it's raining endlessly. Time to safeguard my gear.