OT: Weather

[Tim Streater]

Thunderstorms now here near Canterbury. Lets hope we don't get another near-strike that blows up the router (again).

[newshound]

Although at least you can order an online replacement by mobile phone.

Remember the days of dialup? When one computer is dead, these days you can usually get another one online fairly easily to Google for information.

[Tim Streater]

I basically don't use my phone for the Internet. Too fiddley. When a near lightning strike took out the BT cordless phone base station and the router at the end of June, I called the BT Store the next day and had a replacement the day after. For the router, I called the ISP; took a bit longer (about a week) but I got it in the end.

More pertinently: I disconnected the line this evening because of the storm, and there are more to come. What can I put between the phone socket and the line to the microfilter to protect the line from surges? Frequent plugging and unplugging the line is not a good idea.

[charles]

older BT lines put fuses in the line. I've no idea if they worked.

[Roger Hayter]

Ours has a genuine set of GPO spark gaps fo an earth stake.

[Swer]

Nothing that will ensure that it can't get zapped again.

Easy to have a decent plug and socket that will be happy with you doing that.

[Rob Morley]

Just set it up as an access point and connect your laptop to it.

[The Natural Philosopher]

night befire last knocked power down so had to reboot everything. Saw some last night, and a bit of rain, but nothing near.

PS netgear routers NEVER survive a storm. But may be used as wifi access points thereafter.

years ago when a direct strike took out my US riobotocs 'lifetime gurantee' modem, I asked the USR tech team 'why not put surge suppressors on them'

"cheaper to give the odd customer a new one' he said 'good for our image, and it saves money overall'

[The Natural Philosopher]

They are so cheap I have a spare these days.

Apart from the snmp monitoring it would be swap and renboot and all back up

[The Natural Philosopher]

Not to protect CPE.

I remember back in the Joburg days the POTS would all ring on near miss strikes.

And with a thunderstorm which dwarfed anything the UK had to offer every

3 days the day after was dealing with blown equipment and insurance claims across the whole city.

We tried everything. Ultimately anything connected to a loing peice of war was massivelty vulberanble and would blow eventually.

The optimal solution was for opto isolated line termination cards. Usually just the card blew...

..for our power audio, 100V iron cored tranbsformers protected the power amps.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Indeed.

[Roger Hayter]

Any telephone equipment I've looked at in the last twenty years has MOVs on the line input. They tend to fail short circuit with nearby storms. I am unsure whether they effectively save the rest of the equipment (only useful if you can find similar sized MOVs to cannibalise from other equipment, they have many different physical formats) or merely introduce an unnecessary point of failure.

[tabbypurr]

Phoneline lightning protection is primarily lifesaving. Making a phone call in a thunderstorm in the 1930s could be lethal.

NT

[Roger Hayter]

My spark gaps are more likely to help with that than MOVs. And neither will help with a direct strke or near miss.

[The Natural Philosopher]

All of the above is needful

And as you say a direct strike is 'all bets off'

In general a near strike to a wire nets you hundrdes to a few k V. The spark gap will oabsorb kV levels but an MOV will clamp the few hundreds