On Saturday, October 24, 2015 at 11:17:33 AM UTC-4, westom wrote:
On Friday, October 23, 2015 at 11:42:21 PM UTC-4, Muggles wrote:
We now have battery back-up/surge protectors for our computers that's
supposed to protect from those sort of lightning issues.

Read specification numbers. How many joules does it claim to absorb? Hundreds? A destructive surge is hundreds of thousands of joules.

Two obvious fallacies there. One is that a surge of hundreds of thousands
of joules will almost never reach a UPS or plug-in surge protector adjacent to a PC. Second is that the joule rating
on the surge protector is how much energy the *surge protector can safely
dissipate itself as heat*, not how much energy it can allow through it.
The vast majority of any surge isn't dissipated in the surge protector,
it's not intended to absorb or dissipate it at all. It's function is to
shunt the surge energy to ground.