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Most surge protectors can absorb joules in the thousands.
Posted on: April 26, 2024 at 14:03:08 CT
ZouDave KC
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MAYBE you splurge and get one of the really high end ones that can handle in the tens of thousands.
Cloud to ground lightning contains roughly 1,000,000,000 joules of energy. There's no surge protector coming close to protecting your electronics from a direct hit. Best case scenario there's something in the path that eats all of it and dies a hero, but if it eats that much it likely results in combusting and causes other problems.
At my work, we had a direct lightning hit on one of our buildings last April. We have surge suppression, voltage regulators, uninterruptable power supplies, etc., all over the place to help protect our electrical lines from having these issues. Quite a few of our UPS devices died heroes, but things downstream from them lived. BUT - electricity doesn't follow rules, and it will always seek out the path of least resistance. So while our electrical lines were well protected and we got almost no damage over those - the jolt found its way to our network lines and fried as much as it could along those lines.
We had to replace well over $100,000 worth of IT equipment because of it. Our network switches that died still had working power cables, and our on-staff electricians even showed us that there was electrical function inside of it. But the network line leading to it was fried, and numerous downstream network devices were taken with them. Most of our work laptops that were damaged still worked fine, but not their wired network port. Nor the docking station they were attached to. Nor the VOIP/POE desk phones whose only connection was a network cable. Fried, dead, gone.
We lost over 70 POE wireless access points that, again, didn't even have a power connector - just a network cable that supplies power and network so it can transmit our wireless networks to the campus.
Point of course being - yeah, a direct hit of lightning to your house? You're lucky any electronics survived and there wasn't anything you could've done to stop it. Even if you COULD have a system of things in place to stop the lightning from destroying the stuff in your home, it would probably have cost more to have that than it's going to be to replace everything.
Sucks out loud. Glad no loss of human/pet lives was a thing.
Cloud to ground lightning contains roughly 1,000,000,000 joules of energy. There's no surge protector coming close to protecting your electronics from a direct hit. Best case scenario there's something in the path that eats all of it and dies a hero, but if it eats that much it likely results in combusting and causes other problems.
At my work, we had a direct lightning hit on one of our buildings last April. We have surge suppression, voltage regulators, uninterruptable power supplies, etc., all over the place to help protect our electrical lines from having these issues. Quite a few of our UPS devices died heroes, but things downstream from them lived. BUT - electricity doesn't follow rules, and it will always seek out the path of least resistance. So while our electrical lines were well protected and we got almost no damage over those - the jolt found its way to our network lines and fried as much as it could along those lines.
We had to replace well over $100,000 worth of IT equipment because of it. Our network switches that died still had working power cables, and our on-staff electricians even showed us that there was electrical function inside of it. But the network line leading to it was fried, and numerous downstream network devices were taken with them. Most of our work laptops that were damaged still worked fine, but not their wired network port. Nor the docking station they were attached to. Nor the VOIP/POE desk phones whose only connection was a network cable. Fried, dead, gone.
We lost over 70 POE wireless access points that, again, didn't even have a power connector - just a network cable that supplies power and network so it can transmit our wireless networks to the campus.
Point of course being - yeah, a direct hit of lightning to your house? You're lucky any electronics survived and there wasn't anything you could've done to stop it. Even if you COULD have a system of things in place to stop the lightning from destroying the stuff in your home, it would probably have cost more to have that than it's going to be to replace everything.
Sucks out loud. Glad no loss of human/pet lives was a thing.
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Most surge protectors can absorb joules in the thousands. - ZouDave KC - 4/26 14:03:08
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