lightning strike

[kecked]

Well it happened again. I got hit by lightning. Took out so far:

2 TV
2 Stereo
Microwave
Stove
Fridge
Garage door opener
charging ipod
laptop

My laser projector power supplies and one of my projector amps appear dead but my power in the house is hosed so not sure

Here is the good news. Since I used lasorbs all of my diodes survived!

Looks like a tree in my backyard is blown to bits but I can't see in the dark.


Oh well. Twice in two years.

[Stiffler]

Are you missing any toes?

BTW, this would make a great advertisement for lasorb! lol

[kecked]

no but I did feel a tingle in my feet and arms when it happened. Louder than any sound I have ever heard. Did you guys get hit with this too? tornado warnings all night.

[kecked]

just found a hole in my garage roof. branch went through the roof.

shit my air is dead too.

[Stiffler]

Oh, that SUCKS! I hope you have a good insurance policy!!

We got hit pretty hard where I live in Michigan, and there was at least one tornado reported in the Ann Arbor area.

[mixedgas]

That storm really rattled us. Its rare a T-storm causes me to rig a generator and carry a flashlight, but that one did. I didn't want to tell Kecked about the Wall cloud that passed over his house on the radar... But it did .

Steve

[Lazerjock]

Living in Fl (sometimes known as the lightning capitol of the world) made me buy a whole house surge protector. They connect to your main lines in your breaker box. They are good for blocking large surges. I still have the power strip style surge protectors on my computer and TV (the more, sensitive equipment) but the whole house protector keeps things like the frige and AC safe.

[buffo]

A whole-house surge protector will help with shitty power-line transients, but it won't do jack against a lightning strike that hits really close to your house or to your incoming power line. At close distances (couple hundred feet) the high current flow of a cloud-to-ground strike will create a massive magnetic pulse that will induce a huge voltage spike in your house wiring. Depending on how close the actual strike is to your house, this induced spike can run to thousands of volts.

I had lightning strike about 40 feet outside my bedroom window nearly 20 years ago. (Exploded a tree into burning charcoal briquettes and made one hell of a bang.) Took out every touch-lamp in the house, the TV, the VCR, the home stereo system, all the telephones, the modem on my Amiga 500 computer, the CIA buffer chips on said Amiga computer, the 1084S monitor for said computer, all the ground-fault breakers and outlets in the house, a Casio electronic keyboard, and the clock on the stove. Amazingly the heat pump and refrigerator both survived though, as did all the other major appliances.

A year later I had to replace my 200 amp feeder breaker in the breaker box, and that's when we found the rest of the damage. I had evidence of past arcing from the 0000 service entrance cable to ground all along the entire length of the cable run. That insulation is officially rated for 600 volts, but is really good to well over 3KV, and it still failed. Also, most of the phone wire in the house had similar damage. (And I thought I just had shitty phone service.)

Bottom line: lightning has enough voltage to jump through miles of air (which is a pretty darned good insulator). There's no surge protector on the market that can stand up to that. And even if you don't get a direct strike, "close enough" is still enough to induce a catastrophic surge in your home wiring (including your phone wires).

Adam

[Lazerjock]

I agree it won't do anything against a somewhat close strike, but I think it's better than nothing. At least it's a first line of defense and the power strip surge protectors are the second line.
There isn't much more you can do except unplug everything you care about, which I've been known to do in really bad storms.

Chris

[swamidog]

i had the same thing happen about a year ago:

http://www.photonlexicon.com/forums/...439#post264439

i blame csshih.