Lightning hit near the house..

gord

gord

gord

Soldato
Joined
18 Oct 2003
Posts
19,415
Location
Midlands
Hi team,

So, everyone loves thunder and lightning. Until it wipes out everything connected to the aerial or telephone lines.

Has anyone else experienced this? Fortunately most of the items in the house are on surge protectors, which appear to have done their job. The only things unprotected were those connected to an aerial or a phone line (apart from the HiFi, the Z5500s, the cooker hobs and the dishwasher).

I'm just wondering how much damage may actually have been caused. Is it just all the end point stuff that takes the hit? Everything connected to the Sky box appears to have been nuked, along with the sky box itself. The Netgear D7000 is very unhappy, along with the items mentioned above.

Will probably have the insurance people out shortly, followed by BT and Sky, but would be good to hear if anyone else has advice.

Cheers.
 
I hate lighting. For exactly this reason. Everytime its close I worry about my equipment. I've had a close strike nearly take out my router and the phone never worked properly again. I even remember the crackle of static and thought "thats not a good sign..."
 
We once had lightning strike the house itself (side of the chimney breast/roof because of the aerial in the loft we assume) it fried the telephones, but thats all. PC is on surge protector, but nothing else is. I guess we were lucky thats all it took out! :)

Didn't half wake me up though, was like a gunshot going off next to my head, and then the lights didn't work. Very scary and confusing for a half asleep person! :p
 
I was out playing tennis nearby in the storm at the time, joking about how it doesn't hit stuff.. completely jinxed myself.

Anyway, the equipment attached to the phone lines or aerials are fried or semi-fried along with anything physically wired to those. We borrowed another phone to test and we can make calls, but there is an intermittent dial tone. The internet does sync too but it won't maintain the sync. It drops out before it negotiates with the ISP..
 
Last time my parents house got hit by lightning, it took out the Billion 7800N, it had a burn mark going through it, the ethernet cable between that and the PC had fused into one piece of copper.

Little crab on the realtek network chips inside pcs, his arm had blown off :(
 
I had a lightning strike take out my FTTC faceplate, Openreach modem, AirPort Extreme, HP switch and the LAN port of a Microserver. But it took the roof off a house about 50m away so not all bad.

Apple replaced the AirPort, HP replaced the switch, BT replaced their stuff. Had to buy a new network card for the server.

After that incident the Openreach modem got an APC lighting arrester sat on the ethernet cable between the modem and the rest of the LAN, wired into the earth terminal of the mains socket.

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Interesting. I have seen some mentions of surge protecting home networks, I suppose it's one of those things 99% of us will never need.

Managed to pick up a new D7000 today and back up and running on the broadband thankfully. Annoyingly it's wiped out my motherboard's network adapter and the computer is doing strange things like not shutting down properly. I guess I'll start with swapping out the mobo and going from there.
 
I had 2 Sky boxes and my PC PSU fried by a lightning strike on a nearby substation once a good few years ago. No loss in supply or anything, they just died with a bit of a smell and that was that. Had to buy a new PSU and blagged a new box from Sky.

Surge protectors will NOT help with a direct lightning strike and usually don't help with indirect ones either.
 
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