w_tom wrote:

A surge protector will 'stop' what kilometers of sky could
not? Victims of ineffective protector myths (such as Mike
Tomlinson) who promote these half truths. (Mike will reply
with insults to prove his technical superiority).


Blimey...what a load of waffle.

Look, I've worked in Africa, where storms are frequent and severe, and
believe me, nothing stops even a near miss from buggering up anything
connected to a long piece of wire in the vicinity of a ground strike.

In the end, opto isolators and line transformers for audio seemed to
reduce but not eliminate returns, and replacing the opto panel was
cheaper...

When I returned to the UK, I DID get struck by lightning. Took out the
overhead phone line and reduced it to a smear of carbon across the road.

What went?

Well, the modem was toast, and the serial/parallel card it was plugged
into. And the input side of the laser printer plugged into THAT. The
lightning then jumped into the mains wiring and raced round the house. I
lost the PSU on a laser printer, I lost a CMOS chip on a digital hi-fi
turntable, and I lost the digital stuff on a TV - but it was old and
went in the skip.

The high stuff survived, as did most of the computer.

The carpet got a bit burnt where some mains cables ran underneath and
over it.

An unused aerial socket connected to nothing was blown to pieces and out
of the wall, as was an unearthed mains socket some cowboy had wired in
on two core cable.

In all it cots me about 300 quid to get everything fixed, including new
second-hand TV.

The landlord got the cottage rewired on the insurance since he felt it
was a good idea and argued that after a strike like that he wouldn't
want to be responsible for its condition.

Surge arrestors are a complete waste of time. Every BT phone socket has
one. They don't work against a direct strike, or even a near miss. They
sort of work a bit when its vaguely in the area.

In general a near miss on my overhead power lines here, causes the RCD
to trip.

The greatest danger to computers is a momentary loss of power as the
mains goes off, followed by auto reconnect, followed by a second loss of
power when the grid discovers the branch is still on the line etc.. If
the computer is set to auto boot, that generally crashes the disk head
JUST in the middle of the boot sector or close to it.

Lost two computers operating systems that way, one past all recovery.