Categories: Top ::

Home: Lightning... the aftermath, or, How to help protect your home from future power surges
Tue, 09 Aug 2005

On August 2nd, 2005, a fairly mighty storm swept through Mississauga (okay, not a tsunami, but severe for what we see here.) Hailstones a good half inch or more across made me worry about the integrity of car windows, power was out everywhere, and lightning came down every few seconds.. quite a spectacle that I enjoyed from the confines of my little Honda Civic. The winds were shifting direction every few seconds and resulted unbeknownst to me in a horrific airliner crash while I drove around looking to find a copy of Final Fantasy: Tactics or La Pucelle for PS2 (which I didn't locate.) On returning home I found our home without power and set about turning off the air conditioner and got to reading some Savage Sword of Conan comics to pass the time... though as the hours stretched on and my laptop batteries ran out I started to get concerned...

I was oblivious to the main problem until my wife got home and her keen eyes spotted rubber bits all over a bed in one room. When examined a little closer we noticed that one of the phone lines was missing, replaced with a nice scorch-mark on the wall -- then we got worried. I ran around the house pulling books off bookshelves (and I have a lot of books!) to move shelving out to examine the wiring and make sure no sparks had started fires. The hydro boys came by around midnight (8 hours later) and helped get the house up and going -- before the freezer melted and food went bad, etc. Thankfully when power was restored most things worked, though it took a few days to notice what all the impacted things were (and a week later, we've still not checked everything.. like every power recepticle, every VCR and gadget, etc.)

The perceived damage..

An exhaustive list is being worked on, but the obvious things were: All our phones were shot (barring the oldest ones - they don't make 'em like that anymore!), including the phone lines in the walls themselves (visions of ripping open walls in this pretty new house danced around my mind..); a television didn't work anymore (cable? TV itself?); garage door opener; DSL modem (the modem? ethernet ports on connected PCs? just the phone wiring?); a firewall router not 3 weeks old (lights didn't show activity when there was some; PC side? router side?); an 802.11 wireless access point; a desktop PC; a not-three-week old server for email, web, etc; A monitor popped. Various other electronic gadgets and things plugged in at the time, but I don't want to list them all. My wife made a long list of things to check (toaster, blender, stove, microwave, wall sockets, lamps, etc etc.. so we'll find more I'm sure.)

What happened?

Its hard to know how the surge came in and how it travelled, though we've got some good ideas; it likely didn't come in via the expected route - the breaker box, demarcation phone line, etc. It very likely came in via the phone lines in one of our small rooms, though how it got there is the mystery.. or perhaps it came in via television cable, or perhaps via piping in the ground. (The electrician talked about lightning striking the ground blocks away and travelling via water pipes into homes, and other nefarious backdoors.) For sure, the wiring from the phone demarc to a 2nd floor room (the most difficult to route new wires to!) was okay (thankfully!), and okay to a unused jack in the middle of the floor - though from that location to another room was fused and the jack melted. That room took most of the hit, with wiring simply exploding all over, and the jack a charred mess. The phone in that jack had call display and thus a power plug to support it, and I suspect this is how the surge got into the homes power system...

From this jack it went through the phone system in the rest of the house and caused a nice cascade.. the DSL modem in one room fried, and connected the surge into the ethernet networing cables and thus proceeded to fry our firewall router and passed through it to fry our wireless access point and two connected PCs (the server and desktop PC). Some of these things were only a few weeks old...

It crossed to another phone line in our master bed room and burnt up that jack and wiring, and then proceeded down into the kitchens jack on the main floor, wiping it out. We sorted all this out with a multimeter and crossing varous wires, to figure out the connectivity path but boy it would've been nice if the house builder provided a wiring schematic for phone and cable and such... ah well. For all that money you're lucky to get a house :) It was interesting to note .. we tested connectivity between phone pairs by checking permutations (red pair to green pair, etc) and found that okay, but most pairs didn't work. We were very fortunate to have 3-pair in the phone wire in the house, while most homes have 2-pair (two lines) only. In our case, 2 different pairs were fried at every point, but were very lucky to find one pair (a different one at each phone) was good... so from one room to another the red pair might work; from that room to a third might be the green pair. So our wiring is now a total mess, but it works.. better than running new wires through the walls, since fishing lines through tiled bathrooms or up two floors means a lot of ugly holes and repainting etc..)

Not sure how the cable TV system and garage door opener got involved, but I'm assuming that once the surge hopped through a phone (destroying it) and into the power system it spread into these things.

Some things we learned about defending ourselves..

OKay, all this posting and I just wanted to say these few points, though theres more in my head floating around..

Anyway, I don't want to spend too much time goin on about things here.. I've got walls to clean, books to put back, furniture to re-assemble... but at least we got our phones working, and I picked up a new DSL modem and router and motherboard for a PC and....

Sigh

At least our electrician was cheery and talented. $40CDN/hour wasn't so bad (and hes also a fireman. Being a coder is just so un-manly when these fellas are around :), and theres more repairmen coming today and maybe tomorrow.. its taken a week, but life is returning to normal.

Note to self..

[ Category: / day_by_day / home ] [link] [Comments]