Wayne Boatwright wrote:

On Tue 25 Nov 2008 10:44:19p, BobK207 told us...



After some time away..............came home to:

two TV's
two DVD / VCR combos
wireless router
garage door opener
forced air furnace
GFI in garage tripped & will not reset
some wall repectales & lighting circuits not working
(but no breakers tripped and power ok on both hot legs)

all items were non-functional, non- responsive, no power up

cable company had called & said their cable equipment in the vicinity
of our house was "blown"

I pulled the panel cover & tightened all wire clamps on the breakers
and the screws on the neutral bus....found a couple slightly loose.
All circuits returned to working order.

furnace 24v transformer bad...replaced it and furnace now working
bought new router before I checked to see if old router failure was
just power supply, it was

no lightning storms while away

any ideas as to cause of destruction of all these electronic items?

voltage surge? cause of said surge?

cheers
Bob



Voltage surge. Who knows. Call your power company. They should have some
sort of record of anything unusual. It also wouldn’t hurt to have them
come out and check electrical service, including panel.

The key thing here is that the cable company indicated their gear in the
vicinity was blown. Check with your neighbors as well to see if they had
similar issues.

As has been noted, the loss of a neutral connection can do this type of
damage. If it affected more than just your house i.e. the cable
company's gear and/or neighbors, it is possible that the neutral may
have been lost on the utility transformer that supplies several homes
(varies by area as to how many homes would be served).

Another relatively common possibility would be "man-made lightning"
caused by an event suck as a falling tree branch or an auto accident
that causes the high voltage primary wires at the top of the pole to
contact the lower voltage wires a bit further down that supply the
houses.