Lightning prone location areas

[jeffreyg]

I live in one but until Tuesday night never had a problem. Lightning struck a tree 40ft from our house actually going right through it and stripping the bark 360 around 8ft of a one hundred year old oak. It took out many electronics plus our landline phones and modems. Photographically it took out my computer, large printer and scanner. Fortunately my enlarger was not plugged in. All that were "fried" were connected to surge protection. Once replaced all the equipment will be unplugged when thunder storms are in the area. I recommend all with delicate equipment consider unplugging (what a nuisance). Any suggestions as to how to do this easily. I thought a power strip plugged into a new surge protector with the equipment plugged into that so only one item has to be unplugged.

 

[AgX]

There are different kinds or surge protectors. But I am interested to know why yours failed.

A surge protection built into each device would be a good idea too.

 

[jay moussy]

There is a website (or two, or three) showing real time lightning strikes.
I followed one such site last month, after I heard some distant rumble, and sure enough, I was able to zoom in my locale, monitor the lightning "band' go right past me, after doing some unplugging around the house.

Florida is a magnet for lighting, I am told..?

 

[Donald Qualls]

There are different kinds or surge protectors. But I am interested to know why yours failed.

A surge protection built into each device would be a good idea too.

Most surge protection is sacrificial -- that is, after absorbing/cutting off a surge, the protector is destroyed. Building this into equipment, necessitating an expensive repair to replace a cheap device, or prompting replacement of expensive equipment due to ignorance, isn't an improvement.

Very few surge protectors, however, can stop the kind of surge from a close lighting strike. There's just too much induced voltage and current, even if the strike doesn't directly contact a power, phone, or antenna wire. Ham radio operators often have "lightning arresters" that use the extreme voltage to route the bulk of the strike to ground through a low-resistance path -- but those aren't really an option for primary power and phone wires. Unplugging isn't much of an option, either -- it won't protect you if you're not at home when the storm passes over, for instance.

The best protection in this kind of situation is probably a correctly installed network of lightning conductors (aka "lightning rods") which will preferentially attract a strike and ground it out with minimal damage. Lightning being what it is, no such protection is perfect -- but its worth checking that your homeowner's or renter's insurance covers equipment damage from lightning.

 

[GRHazelton]

Years ago lightning struck a neighbor's unused CB antenna. It started a small fire in their attic, easily extinguished by the Fire Dept with minimal damage. Since we were on the same transformer, we saw some action, too! It ate a microswitch in the icemaker, killed a nice stereo receiver, and ...... having induced a large charge in some foil backed wallpaper in the bathroom (which I had only recently hung!) arced here and there along EVERY joint! Just imagine answering Nature's call when that fireworks show occurred! I had our homeowner's insurance repair the damage.... Mother Nature has an odd sense of humor!

 

[jeffreyg]

I learned plugging a surge protector into anything but the wall outlet is a no no so don't do that. (mine was plugged into the wall) I'm in the process of replacing the gadgets but insurance does not cover software. Hopefully my backups will restore them on a new computer. Make copies of your software. We'll see if a new OS will accept them. If nothing else don't believe the Ben Franklin kite story he would have been fried.

http://www.jeffreyglasser.com/

http://www.sculptureandphotography.com/

 

[reddesert]

I work sometimes at a research installation that is vulnerable to lightning strikes, including the potential for direct hits. Our lightning shutdown procedure includes turning off all the important devices, turning off the UPS they are plugged into (this is the size of a small file cabinet, not the UPS a normal person buys for a home computer), and unplugging the UPS from the wall.

We leave the "housekeeping" stuff on (lights, coffeemaker, telephone, wifi router), on the basis that we can afford to replace those and it would be annoying to shut them down every time we had the potential for lightning.

Donald is correct that a surge protector cannot stop a close lightning strike. Surge protectors are more for defense against a surge that might happen if there is a fault on the power line, like a neighborhood blackout and recovery. A close strike can jump all sorts of paths that ordinarily wouldn't be conductive. It can in principle even fry unplugged devices, but this is uncommon.