Had an electrical surge

Yesterday morning at 3:55 we had a the brightest lightning I had ever seen and the loudest thunder I had every heard. Then all of sudden alarms started going off. It must have been close. It messed up the CO2 detector, set the sump pump alarm off, and and sent the house alarm to battery. So then cell phones start ringing because the alarm company wants to know what is going on and to make sure we are OK. It also blew 10 bulbs of 18 in our ourdoor low voltage lights that we just put out last Friday/Saturday and the 2 Garage Door Openers in the garage attached to the house. At that time that is all I knew.

When I left for work at 6:00, In the office I found the UPS, computer, and phones were all dead. Monica later called me and told me the 52" Samsung wouldn't work and a few other misc. things were bad including the DSL modem & router.

I think we have everything back and working now except for a few minor things and the TV and computer. I tried a new power supply in the computer because I could tell the other one had been smoked. That didn't work.

Now the bad part. She called me later and set the Suburban turn signals wouldn't work. Apparently the surge jumped from the GDO down to the Suburban right below it. It also said the hood was open and the back hatch wouldn't work. We have found a bunch more things not working on it. I took it in for diagnostics this afternoon. The know the Body Control Module and the Liftgate Module are bad for sure. Out of 28 computers on the Suburban, 14 of them are reporting an issue. Worst part is some of it is intermittent, so they are thinking we have some shorts in the wiring. They are think at this point at least 2 weeks labor to strip the interior and go through all of the wires and computer. They are betting the insurance company will totally as they won't want to keep throwing money at it. It is an '08 with 10k miles. So far they are guessing we are looking at a minimum of $10k damage. And then we may always have problems with it - including probably losing the factory warranty because they will always come back and say this caused it. Don't really want it totaled because we can buy another one for what we paid for this one, but don't want a headache either. Prior to this, the Suburban hadn't been back to the dealer for anything.

Several years ago I noticed my neighbor about 50 yards away and accross the street was changing his garage door opener, I was changing mine too. Both were knocked out by lightening (we decided) during the lightning storm the night before. Weird what it does sometimes. Both GDOs were all we could find damaged.

We're getting the lightning and torrential rains now. We dealt with major lightning damage last fall. One of the garage doors still is not back to normal. Thank goodness it did not get any of our vehicles. Good luck getting all your stuff back to normal Jim.

Jim that is terrible and I am so sorry.

I live in a manufactured home and am always worried about IT or me during extreme weather.
Don't even have a garage to protect my car, so it's always out there in the elements.

Like Doc, said.. hopefully you'll get everything back to normal soon.

Doc: hang on to your hat..

we are getting hammered now by the same storm. internet has been off 4 times since 1 am. calling for60+ mph winds later today and snow by sunday morning. hope this is it for this year.

We had a wicked thunderstorm roll through a few years ago. I was out a my parents place by the lake. What a night that was. Dad was in the hospital in ICU for a burst ulcer in his intestine(he nearly died). My bro and I went to check on their place while they were at the hospital. They had a bunch of mature poplar and a few huge spruce trees in their yard. The wind was soo strong that night. Trees were falling down all over the property. One dead poplar came down right were I was standing next to my car going between the garage and the car and missing both by inches.

Their boat was tied to their floating dock with the front tied to the dock and the rear tied off to a tree on shore just to keep the boat from hitting the dock in rough weather. There were 5-6 ft whitecaps coming in out of the north that night. This is a 16ft fishing boat we're talking about. The dock was getting rocked and beaten by the waves and the boat was taking so much of a pounding that the 10 inch long lag bolt dad had the boat attached to on the dock ripped right out of the dock sending the boat crashing up against the rock wall on shore with waves pounding it all night. There wasn't much we could do in that situation. Kind of helpless.

Then, as we were standing outside with trees falling down all around us and the boat crashing up against the shore, the sky lit up and a bolt of lightening struck the neighbors house frying basically every electronic piece in their home as well as half of the stuff in mom and dads home. Next, we heard yelling coming from the neighbors. Seems the lightening strike caught the wiring on fire behind their tv. I ran over and got them out of the house, grabbed an extinguisher, flipped the main breaking off to the house, and put out the fire that was just starting to smoulder. This was an elderly couple in their late 70's early 80's living out there during the summer months.

What a night that was.

muleman said:

we are getting hammered now by the same storm. internet has been off 4 times since 1 am. calling for60+ mph winds later today and snow by sunday morning. hope this is it for this year.

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I got knocked offline and this end of town went dark shortly after I posted the above last night.
It was from the high wind gusts, which we're still getting.
Thank God it's now a gentle 40mph and not in the 60 range
It's chilly here too, in the 40s.

would lightning rods have helped or help in the event it happens again?

benspawpaw said:

would lightning rods have helped or help in the event it happens again?

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Good question Ben. I'd like to know the answer to that also.

The storm that passed through this area Friday night / Saturday morning got me again. I mentioned above the garage door was not yet back to normal from the lightning that got us in 2009. Well the storm Friday night got the other garage door opener. The remotes and key pad will not work. The inside wired control will open the door but will not close it if you simply hit the button (as designed). If I hold in on the button continuous the door will close. I have to find a garage door opener repair place to work on it.
Plus the storm ruined my linksys router, messed up my laptop and tripped the circut breaker to the washer and dryer. It also fried the battery backup side of my surge protector. I get no power through that side now no matter what I do. That is where my laptop was plugged in.

We're on top of a hill and more often than not we have lightning dancing all around. If lightning rods would help I would sure be interested in giving them a shot.

That sounds pretty familiar Doc. I was pretty worried Friday after starting to get stuff fixed when that storm went through that I was going to lose it again. We were up because Addyson was up crying (OK, screaming for some reason) from midnight until about 2:30. I watched the lightning pretty nervously as I had already started replacing a lot of the smaller things - GDOs, router, DSL modem, etc. Fortunately, we came through that one OK.

We went to the Salt Creek Falley Queens Pageant Saturday Night (My daughter Alexandrea won First Attendant) and we were talking to some of our friends. Two of them happened to be heading to work about 4:00 Thursday morning and both of them said that were scared and it looked like the lightning just totally swarmed our house.

I'm thinking our surge this time came in through the DSL line as everything except for the GDOs and the Suburban were connected to either a phone line or an Ethernet line.

I did go Friday and bought a whole house surge suppressor. It goes into the breaker box on two poles. That is what the Electrical Store (not a big box store) sold and they had pretty good results with it, but even it says it isn't designed for a direct lightning strike.

Is that something you (assuming a non electrician) can install Jim? Sounds like something I could use for sure. We have not had a direct hit but it sure has been in the vicinity.

Congrats to your daughter (and to her proud parents)!

This particular surge suppressor is failry straight forward. If you are comfortable adding new breakers into your box, you can do this. It snaps onto a double pole breaker and then a wire to your neutral bar.

Mine will be a little more complicated because I have to make room for it. I had to buy 2 of the double breakers so that I can "piggyback" 4 circuits onto 2 poles to free room up in the panel for this. The directions say to install it as close to the main breaker as possible. This wasn't that expensive, something like $60. I'm assuming an electrician wouldn't charge too much to do this if you aren't comfortable adding it to your breaker box.

Thanks for the congrats. She was disappointed at first she didn't get Queen, but then later happy that she is on the court and will get to go around to the festivals.

If you think about garage doors for a minute they have some interesting features. Long metal rails which are usually not grounded well except through the openers....

Actually a lot of lightning hits are not actually contact, but are induced. You may have heard of EMP (electro-magnetic pulse) and lightning acts the same way. Garage door rails make a pretty fair antenna system and when the wavelength is right, well, things will happen. The vehicle may have been the victim of a "reflected" pulse from the rails. If this be the case, all the surge suppressors in the world would be useless and lightning rods can and do cause the same problem on occasion.

Welcome to the wonderful world of electronics!

Lightning rods may have helped. They are connected in such a way as to "try" to divert the hit to the ground. But I have been hit before with a strike close by that traveled through the ground, so who knows.

A surge suppressor is not really designed to clamp that size of voltage. It may help some, but if it gets the hit, it make it fry inside and everything else connected to it will too.

If anyone decides to check into a lightning arrestor system, make sure they(the company) are UL certified.