Electrical storms

arclight

arclight

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Had a bit of T&L last night, but it was not very near.

Anyone take any precautions during lightning, such as unplugging PC and/or modem?

I have heard of a Sky box and a dial up modem being blown.
 
unless you suffer a direct strike then i think your TV/sky/internet should be okay.

but then going around the house and unplugging everything is the least of your worries if you get a direct strike lol

otherwise your main concern should be powercuts/surges which lets face it can happen outside of T&L storms anyway. home UPS units are fairly cheap now, might be worth investment for always on equipment (server, external HDs). otherwise yes, just turn your computer/HD's off.
 
Chaz Photos said:
All my equipment is plugged into a surge protector get a good one and its insured as well
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My PC is plugged into one. Don't know how effective it is.
Maybe depends on how near the lihtning is.
 
Used to work for HP and although it's rare we did have it occasionally... I never take precautions and have never personally had a problem. However, if anything ever does blow.. just don't mention it was during a thunderstorm as it's a fantastic get out clause for electronics providers.... even if a mouse stopped working we would refuse to replace it if the customer had mentioned it occurred after a thunder storm, always best to plead ignorance as there is no guarantee that the failure was a result of the lightning but the manufacturer will assume it was...

In fact we used to get a lot of PC problems where strange things would happen, like lines on the monitor, modems not working etc etc that were actually down to faulty surge protectors causing interference in the supply..., unplugged them and put the machine straight into the wall socket and the problems went away
 
my house got hit once thanks to scaffolding across the road - bolt came down the phone line :/

turned my pc off for me and blew my dsl modem up (rattle noise when shook it afterwards) so had to get new one, pc was fine though

my advice, get some surge protectors :)
 
surge protector wont protect from powercuts though.

exmple i had a call the other day from one of our stores that had had a powercut, the power came on but one of their tills (PC with touchscreen basically) refused to power back on.
 
Just surge protect on tv and imac.
Dont tend to turn stuff off.
Friend had Direct Stike to the tv ariel Whoe Big Bang
 
neil_g said:
surge protector wont protect from powercuts though.

exmple i had a call the other day from one of our stores that had had a powercut, the power came on but one of their tills (PC with touchscreen basically) refused to power back on.
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That would have been the power surge just before the power cut that killed the PC.

Just cutting the power from a device won't stop it powering on again. Might b****r up the software on the system if it's anything like most of the crap EPOS software I've ever had the ill fortune to deal with, but won't knacker the hardware.

If there are storms around, and you've not got a surge protector, I'd advise disconnection from the wall any equipment you can't afford to lose.
 
mid_gen said:
That would have been the power surge just before the power cut that killed the PC.

Just cutting the power from a device won't stop it powering on again. Might b****r up the software on the system if it's anything like most of the crap EPOS software I've ever had the ill fortune to deal with, but won't knacker the hardware.

If there are storms around, and you've not got a surge protector, I'd advise disconnection from the wall any equipment you can't afford to lose.
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maybe, maybe not. there are no physical signs of anything being blown, fuses are intact and none of the circuit breakers flipped etc.

either way powering off without shutting down is a one stop journey to broke hard drive land.
 
Powering off won't physically damage the hard drive at all, certainly modern ones which I'm pretty sure park the heads even in the event the cable is pulled.

Depending on your operating system you may see your filesystem corrupted if it was in the middle of some writes at the time...but again, most modern flavours of Windows are more than capable of dealing with it, they'll just take a while longer to boot up as it does an integrity check.

Anyway, the main problem with powercuts, especially during a storm is that they are usually associated with a power surge, which a surge protector would protect you from. Nothing's ever died from being unplugged unless it was knackered already :P
 
neil_g said:
maybe, maybe not. there are no physical signs of anything being blown, fuses are intact and none of the circuit breakers flipped etc.

either way powering off without shutting down is a one stop journey to broke hard drive land.
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Nah, sounds like dry PSU capacitors. Happens when kit has been running non-stop for years, basically the eletrolytic caps leak and lose their electrolyte, but will still hold a charge. As soon as the power goes out, zip, nada, nothing, the kit will never power up again. I work in a controlled environment (UPS + generator backup) with £1000000's worth of kit, some of which has been active 10 years with no issues, yet as soon as you switch it off - dead as a doornail. Swap PSU (or replace caps) and it's all up and running again...

Powering off modern hard drives will have no detrimental effect on them physically, I've never seen a HDD "broken" by powering it off mid read / write, plenty of buggered operating systems though!!

Regards

Carl
 
Had a strike near the house once within 50 feet, it hit a tree and blew a huge chunk of bark off the trunk, it was a horrendously loud bang that set the intruder alarm off which required replacement under the household insurance.
 
I had a laptop destoyed in Jan.'08. A bolt of lightening hit the powerline, it also destroyed a diagnostic machine at the garage half a mile up the road, it apparently went with an un mercifull bang. My laptop with an eerie pop.

Every thing now covered by surge protectors, but still don't the chance... Unplug!
 
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