lightning strikes

Not quite.

That is what you should do and change such the lightening damage is covered. It might be worth checking if cover is only for a direct hit on your property or includes nearby strikes as well.

A direct hit will be knocking holes in roofs or demolishing the chimeny along with blowing the sockets out of the walls and it's not unknown for the cabling to "unchase" itself as well...

As far as electronics is concerned it's rarely damage via the mains. It's induction into any connected wires that zap the relatively unprotected and delicate input/output stages. I've got an IP camera and network card that got fried when there was a strike about 200yds away. They were connected by about 15' of CAT5. The camera still works but not its ethernet port.

Reply to
Dave Liquorice
Loading thread data ...

He never went away. Just subtly morphs occasionally to make sure he escapes killfiles. And he's still a one-eyed idiot.

Reply to
Mike Tomlinson

This is accurate IME.

Yes.

Yes.

Yes.

My experience of a _DIRECT_ strike is simply that what gets fried and what does not is almost totally random. A few mm of spacing difference means the arc jumps one way rather than another.

By and large I was surprised at how much kit did survive.

Most of what did not, was associated with the actual phone line that was struck and stuff adjacent to it.

Namely the modem, the serial parallel card into which it was plugged, the laser printer also in the parallel port which fried its input and its power supply.

The only other items of note were two 'digital electronics' bits of kit that were on at the time - a Revox record deck and a TV on standby. The Revox needed a new chip, the TV I scrapped. Its possible that surge arrestors would have protected those, as the discharge ripped round the mains wiring and arced over in many places, needing a complete rewire. I surmise it found the mains via the laser printer.

From personal experience here and in S Africa, the frequency of 'near' strikes to 'real' strikes is about 20:1. With a 'real' strike all bets are off, and the tendency is to either spend a fortune, if uninterruptibility is what you want, or simply pay insurance.

With a close strike, you do well if you have isolated balanced inputs on phones and antennae: This is normally the case anyway..such things usually end up at a balun - and some sort of clamping device to limit overvoltage as well.

Or simply regard the input devices as sacrificial, and replace as necessary. Field engineers with loads of input cards running round in small white vans were the S African experience.

Mains surge arrestors do no harm, but probably do no good either. The actual energy in a close strike is not high, and is easily absorbed by an SMPS and its RF filtering, anyway

Really the manufacturers have seen to the 'average' level of pulse energy in most bits of kit. There's no need to duplicate their efforts, and if its a really bad hit, frankly house fires and most of the wiring being made unsafe are far more a problem than the odd bit of electronics going down.

Insurance as the man says, is the answer.

As far as what to do..well shut computers down, so any power cuts don't trash their disks.

Apart from that, don't do anything. A major direct strike will hop feet, not inches. Its really no point in worrying about it.

Reply to
The Natural Philosopher

In article , westom writes

What do you think the uk in uk.d-i-y means, you complete waste of skin?

Reply to
Mike Tomlinson

I live halfway up a hill and suffered either a direct strike or very close - how can you tell the difference? The video recorder was first in line and got the full treatment. The insides were melted and the digital display blown right across the room. The video recorder was a hire one and the TV was still OK We are now on cable which functions OK except for when their station got hit.

Alan

Reply to
Roberts

Please do not engage w_tom in conversation. Thanks.

Reply to
Adrian C

We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold. I remember westom saying something like:

Oh, do f*ck off. It's tedious.

Reply to
Grimly Curmudgeon

Odd. A few years before all that stuff was running on current loop, and all seemed to be fine!

Andy (Goodricke!)

Reply to
Andy Champ

University of Kentucky.

Reply to
Steve Firth

Andy Champ coughed up some electrons that declared:

There you go - reverse progress

:)

They were installing fibre during my time, but I think they were running X25 or some such over it to the PADs. Hmm. Proper computers...

Tim (Wentworth, Prison Block C)

Reply to
Tim S

In article , Graham. writes

Me neither. That is extremely poor quality.

Another thing: there're only MOVs across phase and neutral. A quality strip would have MOVs between phase/earth and neutral/earth too.

The cable restraint is crap. This is totally shoddy Chinese made junk. Either it's fake or Belkin has allowed their quality standards to slide alarmingly.

A definite fire hazard. I think that should be taken up with trading standards. What if someone had plugged a heater into it? The boys at your local fire station may also be interested or be able to tell you how to get it escalated.

It would be better, yes, but quality is so lacking elsewhere in the construction of that strip that the only place it's fit for is the bin.

Reply to
Mike Tomlinson

I was there the first year it was in use. My son was there the year before they demolished it. A very cheap and nasty block compared with Goodricke and others, they even forgot to plaster the walls.

Reply to
<me9

snipped-for-privacy@privacy.net wibbled:

You should have seen A and B blocks - they forgot to paint the corridor walls too.

At least C had 13A sockets...

Always though Derwent seemed more gentile for some reason... In Wenty we were too busy fiddling the arcade machines to be gentile ;-o

Reply to
Tim S

I think more importantly is, what if your house is distroyed? What are you going to do for the week before the insurance kicks in? Where will you sleep - on the ground? What happens if you have only the pajamas your standing in?

Reply to
zaax

Come up with a unified theory of everything

Bricks for a pillow

Hope that the cord doesn't snap ...

PJs are for wimps

Reply to
geoff

Here in rural France I take no chances; it is common for people to get fried computers / modems / phones during a thunderstorm.

If a thunderstorm approaches I simply unplug the power to the computer, TV etc and disconnect the TV aerial and phone socket. If the storm gets closer and looks like it is going to be directly overhead I also throw the main breaker on the consumer unit and light a couple of candles until it passes. Lo-tech solution but successful.

The power supply in very rural places like this seems more unstable than in towns and the lights flicker a lot as storms approach - sometimes killing (expensive) low energy bulbs; traditional tungsten filament are more resistant to such abuse.

Reply to
David in Normandy

I hadn't seen his posts in any UK group for ages; I thought he must have died. I wonder if...

...no that's too cruel

Reply to
Graham.

It's surprising how many folk forget the latter, I think - they'll unplug stuff from the mains, but completely forget about other paths such as the broadband connection...

Reply to
Jules

If you had that damage, it was not a nearby hit. It was the surge or 'follow through current' due to that surge.

Nearby strikes may cause a long wire antenna to have thousands of volts. So many believe this to be destructive. Then we simply connect that surge via an NE-2 glow lamp. The milliamps conducted by that tiny lamp reduced that thousands of volts to near zero. Why? Because nearby strikes are easily make irrelevant. Notice that every car radio and mobile is destroyed by a nearbly strike? Of course not. Damage from nearby strikes is found in myths. Made irrelevant by protection routine in all electronics.

Routine is to have direct lightning strikes and no damage. Some foolishly believe disconnecting is effective. Not reliable. Not necessary. Your damage is do to surge energy permitted inside the building. That damage sounds too great to be lightning alone. Again, a reference to 'follow through current'.

Reply to
westom

Even here, village in England, I do that; also unplug the fridge/freezer, as motors don't like stop-start.

There is a bit of protection here: the W. Coast Main Line is 100m away, with lobody gert gantries up on an embankment, so I guess that they'd get it preferentially.

Reply to
PeterC

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