Murphy has had a good week

[simont]

On Wednesday lightning struck near my house and my main computer broke down, along with my network connection. I repaired the former a few days later (it was only the power supply), and an NTL engineer has just come round and repaired the latter for me too.

The lightning strike occurred just as I'd finished sorting out the software upgrades I needed in order to do a long-overdue backup of my main computer, which made it a particularly annoying moment for it to blow up! Fortunately, the data wasn't lost and now I have backed it up.

And today I booked an emergency afternoon off work so I could be at home between 12 and 6 for NTL, and of course the NTL engineer has now been and gone, so if I'd known that I could just as well have called it a long lunch break.

Finally … the computer which blew up, and the cable modem which also blew up, and the router which lost one of its network ports presumably by means of the surge going right through the cable modem, were all behind a surge protector which I had thoughtfully installed after my last annoying lightning experience. The power surge laughed at my surge protector, went straight through it without slowing down, blew up several bits of kit beyond it, and left it intact and unaware that anything had happened. Clearly I need a better surge protector; but without a reliable means of producing lightning on demand, it's probably difficult to test them!

Murphy has definitely been having too much fun with me this week.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

You could just come back to work and unbook the holiday.

[hsenag.livejournal.com]

Errm, that was me.

[dennyd.livejournal.com]

The power surge laughed at my surge protector, went straight through it without slowing down, blew up several bits of kit beyond it, and left it intact and unaware that anything had happened.

That's extremely annoying. Name and shame the make/model? I seem to recall mine had some kind of guarantee when I bought it, that anything that got blown up behind it was covered up to some medium-sized sum of money - 500 quid or so. I've no idea how I'd claim at this point though, having thrown all the packaging away as per usual :)

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

I'm sure. Though you feel you should be able to make some sort of complaint: if it doesn't protect from surges, isn't it false advertising to call it a surge protector? What does it do? Protect surges from something? :)

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Sorry, I don't suppose you could actually do anything about it, it just felt that you *ought* to be able to.

[simont]

Name and shame the make/model?

It's a Micromark 8-way mains adapter with built-in surge protector. (I admittedly didn't buy it primarily for its surge protection feature; I mostly bought it because it was an 8-way mains adapter with an indicator showing its total current load, which struck me as a thoroughly useful thing.)

[furrfu.livejournal.com]

Most "surge protectors" are worthless for virtually all surges, and their "guarantees" are usually swaddled in legalese so they'd never have to pay out. Dansdata.com has lots of stuff about power and surge protectors.

If you want decent surge protection, it's best to get a (fairly decent) UPS or a power conditioner. It's one of those things where you need to spend quite a bit to get any result at all -- the alternative is to physically unplug everything when there's a thunderstorm. Which is still an idea if you have ethernet cables running everywhere, because the only real way to protect those would be with a wireless (or optical) bridge...

the alternative is to physically unplug everything when there's a thunderstorm

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Yeah. It isn't by design I currently use a laptop with a wireless network, but it does mean that if I feel cautious I can just yank out all the cables and carry on working.