Central Florida - Lightning Capital of the U.S.

Post by **FlyingPenguin** » Sat Jul 26, 2003 7:06 pm

We just had a REAL nasty storm come through. Around 4pm all hell broke loose. I had 2 bolts hit the pine tree in front of the house, and one hit the power pole which blue the pole fuses for 8 houses including us.

My total damage so far: Linksys Cable router (should be under warranty), 5 port network switch, Linksys USB NIC, call waiting box (transformer was dead shorted and slowly melting down with liquid oozing out).

I have spares for everything, although this spare switch has a f@cking noisy fan on it so I'd better go get another one tomorrow.

I'll probably have LOTs of phone calls for emergency repair Monday morning when everyone gets back to their offices and their computers are dead (lightning is both my friend and my enemy)

OFFICIAL statistics from the Florida lightning tracker site (http://www.citicom.com/lightning.html):
155.3 lightning strikes /minute 178,068 strikes since midnight.

BillyGoat · Post by **BillyGoat** » Sat Jul 26, 2003 7:33 pm

home owners/renters issurance cover that?

Post by **FlyingPenguin** » Sat Jul 26, 2003 8:21 pm

Not enough to make the deductable in this case so it's not worth it, but yes homeowners will cover it usually.

I handle this sort of thing all the time as a repair consultant. 3 important things to remember when you take ANY lightning damage - be it computer, AC, fridge, whatever:

1 - It's nearly IMPOSSIBLE to prove any damage was caused by lightning, so your warranty will cover it ASSUMING you don't tell them that it happened during a thunderstorm. Play dumb. You turned it on this morning and it didn't work. You don't know why.

2 - Homeowners imsurance usually covers lightning and surge damage. You need to get an affidavit from the repairman that basically says - in his opinion - the device was damaged by lightning or a power surge.

3 - Check EVERYTHING electronic in and around the house (electronic water sprinklers for instance). The more items you can claim, the better the chance you'll be over the deductable.

Your insurance agent will have the forms if the repairman doesn't. Some insurance companies require their specific form.

I never volunteer to do this - I don't need the hassle of possibly getting grilled (or worse having to testify) someday by a lawyer representing an insurance company that doesn't want to pay - but if a customer asks me to, I'll do it.

It's usually not a hassle - insurance companies cover lighning damage all the time.

Just finished checking everything else and no other damage: well pump is okay, so is the water softner. The hot tub scared me a bit - breaker was tripped (probably the GFIC tripped when the bolt struck) but it's working fine after a reset.

Pugsley · Post by **Pugsley** » Sat Jul 26, 2003 9:04 pm

yea... there are them people out by you somewhere that make artifical/real lightning bolts with rockets.... its neat.. they monitor the charges in the clouds... and when the time is right, they launch a large model rocket with a thin copper wire that is grounded into the cloud and BAM the bolt will go down the wire and you have lightining.

Post by **FlyingPenguin** » Sat Jul 26, 2003 9:52 pm

Yup - they've done it with lasers too. You create an ionized trail in the sky with a high-power laser - that's enough to give lighning an easy route and it'll follow it.

Still not a practical technology, but they want to develop it for protecting expensive facilities (like nuclear plants) from lightning by drawing the strikes away to a safe place.

EvilHorace · Post by **EvilHorace** » Sun Jul 27, 2003 9:29 am

A take it then that surge protectors still don't help or don't you use them? I've never had any lightening damage here but maybe our power lines havent surged bad enough in storms either.

Post by **FlyingPenguin** » Sun Jul 27, 2003 10:23 am

If you've never lived in Florida, you don't know what REAL lightning is like.

I used to be a sound engineer, and I can tell you stories. Believe it or not, equipment that is NOT plugged into to anything can still take lightning damage. A near strike produces a huge Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) that can damage equipment just by inducing a current through an electromagnetic field.

I used to have a big problem at Hialeah Race Track - any equipment left in storage in any of the smaller buildings would be damaged by lightnign during the rainy season, even if it was sitting on a palette in the middle of the room connected to nothing. We had to convince people to haul the equipment back to the main building for storage.

First off, surge supressors are nothing more than insurance. If you take a direct strike, NOTHING will prevent most of your home's electronics and appliances from being damaged. Might even burn down your house. A direct strike will go right through a surge suppressor like it wasn't there.

The best protection from a direct strike is a lightning arrestor system. I've debated installing one but it's very expensive. Unlike popular misconception they do not take a strike and ground it - they instead disipitate ionization. Lightning follows an easy path, and ionized air is a conductor.

Fortunately most lightning damage is not caused by a direct strike. It's either an EMP pulse from a near strike, or it hits a power pole causing a surge in the power, phone or cable lines.

A surge supressor will only sink as much power as it can handle and then it'll blow, allowing any residual energy to pass through. You can still take damage but the hope is that most of the damage will be taken by the surge protector.

In my case the surge was probably not on the power line - it either came down the cable TV line or it was caused by an EMP pulse (and since one bolt struck right in the front yard, EMP is very likely a large culprit).

Except for the caller ID in the garage (which was probably damaged by an EMP - the phone cable is strung out to the garage on a 200' cable in the air which acts like an antenna), all the damage was on the network. I suspect it came down the cable, nuked the router which in turn nuked the switch and the one NIC. It didn't damage the cable modem, but the 3Com modems they use around here are legendary for shrugging off lightning strikes.

I did not have a surge protector on the RJ45 patch between the cable modem and the router but I put one on there last night (I had two on the shelf). Main reason I didn't use one before is because APC PNets are expensive they're a pain to connect (they don't plug into an outlet - you have to conenct their ground wire to a good ground).

Remember THERE IS NO PROTECTION FROM LIGHTNING! Only insurance. Use surge protection (and don't forget that the phone and cable are two other paths for a surge) and if it's a real bad storm turn everything off and unplug it from the wall.

Only buy GOOD surge protectors (a good one will set you back more than $20) and make sure it has a "Protection" light on it. Always check your surge protectors after a storm to see if the protection light has gone out.

If the light goes out, that strip is worthless - throw it away. It means the surge protector electronics fried sinking a surge.

You can also have a full-home surge protector installed in your breaker panel. They're required by code in Florida.

I'm considering installing one of these which several electrician friends have recommended:

It's a meter socket surge protector, complete with LED indicators to tell you when it fails. Sinks a power line surge right at the meter.
http://www.lbwl.com/resSurgProducts.asp

Pugsley · Post by **Pugsley** » Sun Jul 27, 2003 1:30 pm

out here we just have big metal poles with wires going into the ground... that keeps it away from the house. they are located on the barn out back.. each one has a glass sphear on them, when it breaks you know it was hit.

EvilHorace · Post by **EvilHorace** » Sun Jul 27, 2003 7:02 pm

I once lived in Tampa for about a year (College days) back in '76-'77 but I don't remember any extraordinary lightening there at that time. I do remember some amazing amounts of brief rainfalls, like true cloudbursts that'd only last a few minutes at certain times of the year.
We get a few nasty electrical storms here but it's rare when this area (with buried cables) loses power for long. On occasion I'll unplug PCs if I'm home and know that a bad storm is coming but power surges that do damage aren't that common here.

tweakbox · Post by **tweakbox** » Sun Jul 27, 2003 7:50 pm

Well, as far as lightning goes, if it even gets dark outside I unplug all of my computers, network equipment, and the phone line that connects to the network equipment. Even if insurence would cover it, it isn't worth going through the trouble when I could just unplug it anyway.

Post by **FlyingPenguin** » Sun Jul 27, 2003 8:43 pm

Oh I love this time of year - lot's of service calls.

I have to keep a half dozen modems in the car.

With the nasty storms we had this weekend, I'll probably have a couple of emergency calls Monday.

Mostly fried modems, the occasional toasted PSU or mobo. I've found that quite often a surge will scramble the CMOS. Mobo might seem dead after a storm but you clear the CMOS and it comes back to life.

One client last month took damn near a direct hit - the surge protector on his breaker panel EXPLODED! The surge fried his modem, the house intercom, a VCR, the answering machine, and every wireless phone in the house.

Pugsley · Post by **Pugsley** » Sun Jul 27, 2003 10:37 pm

why not just take and build a 10M Fard capasitor bank and hope it gets hit?

I know this wouldent work... but why havent they figured a way to use this energery? hell even if its just to heat water or somting it would be usefull.

Post by **FlyingPenguin** » Sun Jul 27, 2003 11:22 pm

Hard to harness. Lightning is essentially a plasma. Tends to vaporize what it touches. Impossible to know where it will strike, so where do you build your array?

Moreover, how do you keep the array from being destroyed?

Ever see what lightning does when it strikes? It turns sand into glass.

There's a block of glass on display in the Smithonian (I think - seen pictures). The way the block is cut, you can see the bolt's path through the sand in profile. It melts the sand and turned it into glass. The bolt's path was turned into quartz. The block includes a piece of a buried melted power cable which is what the bolt was after (it made a 90 degree turn once in the ground to hit the cable). The cable was buried 4 feet deep.

Around here people go out and collect these pieces of fused sand - they're quite lovely.

Pugsley · Post by **Pugsley** » Mon Jul 28, 2003 9:30 pm

yea... this i know... but it would have to be one of them rods like they use in a electric blast furnace to make steel... make the colector outta that and just replace it when its toated... the problem is taking that much energy and putting it somewhere all at once... capasitors will just explode and such... about the only thing i see that could take advantage of lightning would be the cold fusion reactors... they could use the bolt to start it instead of the laser... other then that i have no clue.