Last night's storm took out about $2,000 worth of electronics at our place. I even captured the hit that did it. Turn your speakers up and it still won't do it justice. Yes, we had them on surge protectors –– those are toast, too.

Bummer dude. It was a wonderful storm yesterday.

The falt screen, primary Internet router, and primary Internet switch were all in surge protector power strips with othe things that didn't die. The stereo receiver was plugged into the wall outlet directly. The surge protectors are dead, too. It's unclear whether the fatal surge came through the power line or the ethernet connection. All the dead devices had a wired ethernet connection. Things that survived did not have a wired connection.

Most surge protectors have an insurance, that if your electronics are damaged, they pay for replacement.

IF it was plugged into a properly grounded receptacle.

There's an awful lot of homes in Missouri that were not built with grounding wires, and "upgraded" to grounded face plates with the grounding screw just not attached to anything (as there is no grounding wire), or even worse, the grounding screw is attached to the neutral wire (which can carry up to 200V wrt actual ground), called a "bootleg ground."

If your house was built before 1962, it was probably too difficult to re-wire for grounding, so it probably just has empty ground screws behind the face plate. If it was built after 1962 and the electrician wanted to save 1/3 of the copper he billed the contractor for, your house may have a "bootleg ground" as that is enough to fool an inspectors testing doohickey into thinking it was properly grounded. A disturbing number of houses are wired this way.

If you file a claim against the surge protector company, they'll likely find out your house was bootleg grounded.

I had the same thing happen that smoked my flat screen, PS3, modem, router, stereo receiver and DirecTV receiver. It was all wired through a Monster Power line conditioner/surge protector. Apparently they will only warranty the surge protection for a couple years. Go figure it got hit after the warranty period.

Ditto. Those power strips (assuming that's what he was using) are a joke for that.


I just had a vendor come into the office and show off some SPDs last week. I think I want to put something commercial on my main service coming into the house.

Back when I was a kid, our house got hit by lightning and fried a ton of stuff. Sucked. My dad's stereo receiver was taken back into the shop a few times and was never really fixed. I still have it, b/c the sound quality is amazing when it works. It likes to switch inputs from time to time though.