Lightning hit my house last week. I lost a Toshiba notebook, Epson printer, bread machine, mobile chargers and other battery chargers and some other junk with chips in them. No problems for refrigerator, washing machine, lights etc.. Stereo and tv happened to be unplugged for some reason. I thought this was sort of an urban legend, but its actually happens! Notebook was unplugged, but it came through the phoneline too. So I picked up a cheapy Acer notebook, actually pretty nice machine. Anyone else have this happen?
No. nothing like this happened with me.. but this is really terrible!! Where were you / your family etc.. Was anybody hurt or injured ?
Here in Florida it's a common occurance. The phone lines and cable tv lines are the easiest points of entry to cause damage. The power lines can do it as well however. I have seen phones literally blown up and on fire on office desks and the chips blown off modems inside computers. We took a direct hit to the tree next door about a month ago. It came down the tree, went across the ground and blew the boards off a privacy fence before grounding out to the neighbors well. The neighbor lost his printer and some other electronics and I think the well controller. He's cuban and we have a communication gap. So I may not have gotten the whole story through the language barrier. That is about 150 to 200 feet from my house. My power comes in on the opposite side of my home and it blew some breakers in my house. My DSL modem was flakey after that and had to be replaced, but in the big picture, I got lucky only sitting in the dark till I had the guts to go turn the power back on. It's not the first time for me getting hit and I expect we will get hit again. Even if your home owners covers this, the damage is usually below the deductable. :/
No, no one hurt. wE were in bed when it happened. About 2 am, and was it LOUD! Actually, we get a lot of wild lightning storms in this part of Thailand along the Gulf, near the Cambodian border.
I read the thread title and said out loud, "oh no!". While I am sorry to hear that a lot got fried, my first thought was that it was a direct hit to your house and you were missing a portion of it! must have been quite the wake up call @ 2am! we've been lucky, never having been been that close to a strike here in Texas. but you can hear the surge when one strikes very close...in fact sometimes they'll set of my daughter's musical toys!
Never happened such things in my life..though..few days ago..read in newspaper...Give thanks to god that you are alive.....dont you use any anti lightning system in your house..?
Back in 2000, on March 28, i still remember the date, lightening had blasted my television. It had enterd via antenna used for TV. We are using three phase power supply system here and we lost one phase imidiately but other appliances were not hurt.
Two years back my ISP lost 5000 cable modems in a single day because of lightning. It took them a month to replace all 5000 modems. Fortunately only my LAN port (modem) was damaged and they shifted my connection to USB.
Wow, I can't believe it came through the phone line. Did you have any surge protectors hooked up to anything. If not I wonder if that would have helped?
People laugh at me when I tell them they should unplug the phone during a storm but you can get a really strong current down the line if lightnng hits it. Our neighbours told me their phone melted one day when the lightning was overhead and struck the line.