Worth stressing over consoles dying due to surge
A neighbors house a couple houses down recently was struck by lightning and caused a power surge strong enough to kill all of their electronics, surge protector or not. So granted this is very rare, it is possible? Is it worth taking precautions to prevent this and if so, how? Considering I keep around 15 consoles plugged in, seems worth looking into. I asked a similar question awhile back on here regarding heat output and energy saving but im more concerned now about this.
Comments
Best bet is to unplug everything irreplaceable if you have a thunderstorm in your immediate vicinity.
A powerful enough lightning bolt will fry most electronics even with common surge protectors. They just produce a ton of juice that will overwhelm your average home or consumer protector. Even the commercial protectors can't do it 100% of the time if you get a direct strike.
Best bet is to unplug everything irreplaceable if you have a thunderstorm in your immediate vicinity.
If you have a properly grounded house and a "whole house" surge protector ALONG with decent quuality aux. surge protectors at the device you should be protected from a "surge" (not direct lighting strike)
edit: I thought he was referring to a surge NOT a direct lighting strike, I do agree with you @tulpa
I would be more worried that my house was properly grounded (at the receptacle, as well as properly sized grounding electrode conductor and ground rod/cold water bond)
follow Tulpas advice and unplug all your stuff and if thunderstorms are common in your area look into lighting suppression systems.
A powerful enough lightning bolt will fry most electronics even with common surge protectors. They just produce a ton of juice that will overwhelm your average home or consumer protector. Even the commercial protectors can't do it 100% of the time if you get a direct strike.
Best bet is to unplug everything irreplaceable if you have a thunderstorm in your immediate vicinity.
If you have a properly grounded house and a "whole house" surge protector ALONG with decent quuality aux. surge protectors at the device you should be protected from a "surge" (not direct lighting strike)
edit: I thought he was referring to a surge NOT a direct lighting strike, I do agree with you @tulpa
Side note to add to this, we have major issues with surges bypassing the whole "house" surge protector at the farm often. (House in quotes cause, it's not for a house, but isn't an industral sized thing).
Our problem stems from these:
Harvestore silos are made from metal, and have unloaders on them that are hooked into your grid, and are 70-120 feet tall. So they get struck pretty often, and the current can get into all sorts of things from there, requiring radios to be reset all the time. You might be leaning aginst the stainless steel curb in the milk parlor, only to feel stray current zap you as something on the farm was struck.
I also have some issues in my house where I'm at now with surges and sags, but I know why, and it's only on one branch. I have a mini fridge which causes issues when it's compressor kicks on. It's the same one I kept my mini arcade machine on, and yes, I know, it's very bad for it. I'm actually supprised how long it lasted with no issues, 8 years before the HDD finally gave out. The neatest thing was when the arcade machine was on, I would sometime shear the compressor kick in, and then windows would make it's error beep sound. System logs never told me what errored, but I think it was causing some bad input into one of the control readers for the joystick\buttons. Anyways this is one reason I'm a fan of using surge protectors in house even with a whole house one. But I'm not THAT concerned since it's more common for sags than surges internally, and surge protectors don't do shit for brownouts.
Sometimes a desktop or computer can get hit by surge current from the mains and the ATX power supply is destroyed but the motherboard and connected equipment survives. A bigger issue is surge current traveling through peripherals. For instance telephone modems often used to serve as a common backdoor entry point for lightning surge to enter into a PC, and if the phone line was hit by a surge, could destroy the entire motherboard even if the surge strip was powered off and deenergized.
Consumer electronics devices like TVs and stuff are more tricky. The power supply is built into the device and there is an always on standby current because the device is waiting for unput from a remote control or other device. If a consumer electronics device is plugged in but turned off, the rectifier is unfortunately inside the device and non user serviceable so the entire device is toast. Consumer electronics with standby mode never turn off and are not protected from surge damage like old fashoioned appliances with a hard toggle switch.
When in doubt, kill it at the surge strip but be wary of cable/phone lines and other interconnects.
A powerful enough lightning bolt will fry most electronics even with common surge protectors. They just produce a ton of juice that will overwhelm your average home or consumer protector. Even the commercial protectors can't do it 100% of the time if you get a direct strike.
Best bet is to unplug everything irreplaceable if you have a thunderstorm in your immediate vicinity.
If you have a properly grounded house and a "whole house" surge protector ALONG with decent quuality aux. surge protectors at the device you should be protected from a "surge" (not direct lighting strike)
edit: I thought he was referring to a surge NOT a direct lighting strike, I do agree with you @tulpa
Yeah, I've seen first hand what a direct strike does, since it happened in an apartment I lived in during college.
A direct strike will basically fuse your incoming power line together in a way that causes the whole system to become ungrounded.
It's a real mess.
The only way to protect against a lightning strike is with lightning rods. That makes it more likely the lightning will hit the rod instead of your house and travel along it to ground. Even then, it's not 100%. The amount of power in a lightning strike is beyond your ability to comprehend. Other than redirecting it, there's no way to protect our puny electronics from it's might. Heck, a power plant wouldn't be able to withstand it.
If you live in apartments, you might be out of luck getting a lightning rod installed. Your renters are probably unwilling to bother with the cost of installing them, and they certainly won't let you install it yourself. If you live in a short building right next to a very tall one, you're probably safe. That building will basically be your lightning rod.
As for surge protectors, check out this page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surge_protector
A few things to note on this. First of all, surge protection current switching isn't as fast as electricity, so there's always a delay, during which your equipment will get exposed to a little high voltage. If you really want to get a good protection, you'll be spending more on protectors will the fastest possible switch times.
Secondly, surge protectors wear out. http://www.howtogeek.com/212375/why-and-when-you-need-to-replace-your-surge-protector/ Obviously fuses are basically one-time use, but even more durable kinds will eventually break down, and the ones used in a standard power strip (like the Sega branded one for the Genesis tower of power) use one that breaks down in a very predictable fashion. When the "rerouting" circuit eventually does break down, your power strip becomes a dumb splitter. That's the sort Louie the Lightning Bug warned you never to overload, so on top of no longer protecting you from surges, it won't protect you from the dangers of an overloaded circuit either, so be careful. Generally, as that article will point out, they measure the durability in joules, but keep in mind age can also wear out those components. If you've been using the same power strips since you first got your NES, it's about time to start replacing them. Don't use the Sega Genesis power strip any more, in fact. Don't worry, as a lot of modern strips have spacing set up to better accommodate power bricks. My own entertainment setup has about 6 or 7 power strips in it, and now that I'm thinking about it, I really ought to replace a few of those. This can get expensive, especially if you go for the higher end ones with faster switch times, but if you really are worried about power surges, it'll pay for itself depending on how many it protects you from.
The breakers in your house's breaker box are the most reliable sort you can find. They work by passing the power in a coil, which generates a magnetic field. When too much energy flows through it (determined by it's rating and how it is designed), the magnetic field becomes strong enough to simply pull the breaker out of the circuit, flipping the switch. These last a good long while, but even they eventually need to be replaced, as the mechanism that allows it to move back and forth can be worn out either making it too easy for the magnetic field to "break" the circuit (meaning it's tripping on false positives) or, more dangerously, rusting or otherwise getting stuck so that it doesn't trip when it is supposed to. Speaking of which, I think one of my breakers needs to be replaced. It's been getting uppity as of late and I know I'm not doing anything untoward with the voltage.
*Or our own government as a false flag initiative to spur patriotic support for whatever military maneuver they want to engage in.