Your system struck by lightning? What did you learn?

When linesmen work on high tension lines, they don't attach themselves to the ground, they bond themselves to the high tension line!

Scary as f**** to me, but the physics is real.

Best,

E

This is a scary thread, but a wake-up call neverthless.

Has anyone here living in dense residential areas (think Boston, Chicago, New York, and such) had bad lightning experience?

Good thread.  You want to learn from others, not have it happen to you!  I decided to get serious about surge protection after a friend got hit by lightning and lost a bunch of gear.  It took a long time to sort out all the problems at their house.  We get a lot of lightning in our area.

So I got type II whole home surge protection installed on the main panel with a Siemens FS140 Pro.  Installed another Siemens on the subpanel feeding the stereo. The stereo is on Furman Elite gear.  Installed another type II on the subpanel feeding the theater.  The theater is on Zero Surge gear.  All the computers, network, and smaller listening set-ups are on Furman PST.

In a heavy storm, the best protection is to unplug.  Since the theater subpanel is dedicated, that is pretty easy just to flip the whole subpanel breaker instead of unplugging gear (there are 9 total circuits).  The theater has three separate dedicated lines, so those breakers can be flipped too for quick disconnect.  I assume this is a good strategy to flip the breakers?

I still worry about coax as a weak point in my protection. There are two feeds:
- I have an antenna in the attic. The coax line goes through its own Furman PST, then feeds into the SiliconDust HD HomeRun Connect TV Tuner (on a separate Furman PST), which then feeds ethernet to my network (through a CyberMax battery back-up surge protector).  I am considering putting the TV Tuner directly next to the antenna, then plugging that into an access point that has a wireless instead of ethernet backhaul to my network.  That way there wouldn't be a coax or ethernet connection, just the devices power on the Furman PST.  I could unplug the power in a storm and not have to worry about any coax/ethernet connections to the rest of my system.
- Cable internet. I tried running the cable coax through the CyberMax coax and ended up with connectivity issues.  Tried through Furman coax and had worse connectivity issues.  Seems Comcast/Xfinity really wants the coax plugged directly into the modem... Frustrating.  This is definitely a weak point, though at least it is all underground wiring.  And I run the modem's ethernet output through a CyberMax battery back-up surge protector.  And all the network gear power is plugged into the CyberMax which is plugged into a Furman PST.  I am not sure how to improve this.

I luckily don't have phone or satellite to worry about.

Thanks T .