Lightning just took out my PC, TV, AC, and kids Xbox! What a pain!

[mustang guy]

Are lightning rods any help?  I've never lived in a lightning area, so I only know what I read in Ray Bradbury.

 

My Great Grandmother was standing under a big tree when it was struck by lightning, and the flash over (?) burned her and knocked her out.  She recovered, only to be bitten by a cotton mouth.  She took a butcher knife to her arm, poured some whiskey over it, and a little down the gullet.  She recovered from that too.  It's a good thing she survived both, or I wouldn't be here.

My in-laws have them at roof corners. They are connected to braided aluminum (I think) wire and into grounding rods. 

[DizRotus]

JL,

I feel for you. Glad the damage was only to stuff. You can always replace stuff.

When I lived in Grand Haven, MI, thunderstorms would roll in off Lake Michigan with regularity. One night the lightning strikes were frequent, intense and would light up the bedroom even though my eyes were closed trying to sleep. That night, the only casualty was a small color TV. Remember the days when not all TVs were color?

[fuzzydog]

Look on the bright side, it's a great excuse to upgrade!!! 

[Paducah Home Theater]

Look on the bright side, it's a great excuse to upgrade!!! 

 

And that shouldn't just stop at the equipment that got zapped.    

 

[Travis In Austin]

Were any of your devices hooked up to surge protection like Gilbert mentioned? If so, did they work? If they worked what brand were they?

[Paducah Home Theater]

Did it actually hit the house or just come in on the lines?  

[twk123]

That is crazy and I am glad you guys are ok. We had lightning hit our telephone line pole a while back when I was outside. Getting hit close is something you never forget. Luckily it only fried the wal wort 12v adapter to our modem. As others have mentioned, the hard drive should be recoverable. If you want a good backup drive, I love these from Silicon Power and they are pretty much indestructible:

 

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B005GHTEV8/ref=oh_aui_search_detailpage?ie=UTF8&psc=1

 

I just re-format mine then run a windows backup every week or so. Make sure you do the full backup with system image so you can just get a new computer and port everything over. I am actually thinking of getting a small safety deposit box at my local bank to keep one in so it is off site in case of fire or break in.

[muel]

It's amazing how a near strike can create enough inductance on nearby wire to still zap stuff.  I've had far more damage through network and phone lines.  It is a miserable feeling walking around the house at 4 AM checking to see that nothing is on fire and to find what was damaged.  

[JL Sargent]

So apparently the lightning hit a tree 10ft from house traveled down to ground got in an underground electrical service and into the house.

I was able to get downstairs AC going again by swapping out the control board on the condenser unit. Lots of work still to do however. Computer was on a Tripp Lite Isobar but lightning gets to stuff many different ways I'm learning. $1,000.00 deductible on Insurance so probably won't even claim this.

 

Equipment down for the count around here:

 

60" flat panel Tv, Sony Blu Ray, Xbox one Console, Kodi computer, Desktop PC, Dish receiver, Icemaker (of all things), and lastly the two wall mounted light switches that blew apart literally.

 

Nobody was hurt, this is just material crap and I'll work my way through it over the next few days. Thanks for the support though!

[billybob]

Scared me just reading about it!

[Paducah Home Theater]

The interesting thing about lighting strikes is that if it comes in on the main power lines, you actually have a maximum of 6,000 volts / 3,000 amps that equipment can see, due to arcing at the breaker panel and whatnot. IEEE considers this a worst case surge because of this.  Series-mode protectors are supposed to just eat that up and take a virtually unlimited amount of hits at this level.  With switches being blown out of the wall it sounds like the house actually got hit though, I've never heard of that happening.  

 

This stuff freaks me out, as a kid we got hit several times, one of which was so bad it hit our TV antenna tower, caught it on fire, cut it in half, and it ended up mangled and in flames in our swimming pool in the middle of the night.  

Edited July 29, 2016 by MetropolisLakeOutfitters

[babadono]

What lightning can do cannot be predicted IMHO. It depends on its strength. Surge protectors may/may not work also because of the lightning's energy level. Kind of like you can design and build a structure that will withstand a magnitude 8 earthquake, now subject it to an 8.5 and it falls down.

[derrickdj1]

Were any of your devices hooked up to surge protection like Gilbert mentioned? If so, did they work? If they worked what brand were they?

 

I don't think these surge protectors and meant for the type of lighting hit the OP got.  It would of got tore up too. is my guess.

[JJkizak]

Lightning contains so much energy it lives in the quantum particle world and it does just what it feels like doing whenever it feels like doing it.

JJK

[Paducah Home Theater]

On 7/29/2016 at 0:40 PM, babadono said:

What lightning can do cannot be predicted IMHO. It depends on its strength. Surge protectors may/may not work also because of the lightning's energy level.

 

The official story is that no series-mode surge protector has ever had a failure, from any kind of normal surge, including lightning coming in on the main line, since they have come out in 1989.  Look on ZeroSurge's homepage on the banner, "0% failure rate", that's what they're talking about.  We're talking about 27 years at this point.  The only ones that have failed is where lightning actually hit the building or it was a long term event, like a car smacked a telephone pole and a transformer sent high voltage down the lines for several minutes.  This particular situation may have been close enough that it might as well have hit the house.  

[karlson3]

Hi - I live in WV, a few years back a powerful storm front was moving in, and friends and I were chatting in a parking lot adjacent to my house. I was looking down the road and suddenly sparks came off the power line and a sparking orange sphere, perhaps the size of a large beach ball, floated across the road and over an old car parked in my driveway. I don't think the younger folks had any idea of how rare an event they had witnessed. This was no more than 70 feet away. Anyhow a minute or so later, I walked back with a friend to my house in hopes to avoid rain and up that short driveway and another ball formed, floated the same path, then died, hitting the hill's foliage maybe only 15 feet behind us. There was a bright flash and a "zzzzzzat" sound - something like one would hear from one arc's rise on a small AC "Jacob's Ladder" as it died. There was no smell of ozone - no noticeable burning of the leaves. Why did it have that buzzy sound rather than a "snap" like an electrostatic discharge? Could the 60Hz power line voltage put a spin in the ball? Each ball floated slowly - I only directly saw the first while there probably were five who saw the second ball. One person who saw the second ball said it looked about 5 foot diameter when it "popped" - the one I directly saw was more like 2 foot in diameter.  I wonder what would have happened if one of those balls made contact with a human after floating ~50-60 feet ?  I bet most of the friends in their 20's had cell phones with cameras -I did not.   Also bet they didn't think anything special had occurred .  There was no visible lightning strike close to set off the event.