Lightning Fried My Obsy Power Supply....

[laser_jock99]

.....we had a nearby strike on a wind turbine (killed that completely!). The resulting mains surge did a fair bit of damage locally with some people seeing sparks leap out mains sockets!

Luckily the only damage we suffered was my Maplins 12V PSU in the observatory- which I had had left switched off at the wall but still plugged into the wall socket. Might be repairable yet- I'll get the electrical guys at work to check it over.

I thought the EQ6 and Syntrek Hand Controller might have 'brought it' too as they are connected to the PSU but they seem okay.

The laptop, hi-fi & other stuff were all unplugged and therefore survived.

The moral of the story- if it's not in use, unplug it!

[red dwalf]

good advice, you never think it`ll happen to you.

[D4N]

It's bad enough that the rain stops you observing without it blowing your gear up too.

We lost a TV, router, TV box and Apple TV to lightning not so long ago, fortunately the phone company replaced the router and TV box, and Apple replaced the Apple TV so it just cost us a TV.

Got lots of surge protectors now and unplug stuff if there's a storm.

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[pete_l]

You'd hope this sort of thing would be covered by your house contents insurance. Obv. there's an excess, but for expensive gear it sounds reasonable to claim for any damage caused.

BTW, my Belkin UPS's have surge protection built in and come with a £20,000 warranty against damage caused to anything plugged in to it. I can't say if they'd ever pay up but a UPS is a handy thing to have. Especially for short (1 second or less) outages where equipment doesn't power-off / reset properly.

[dmahon]

Make sure you change the UPS batteries as scheduled. I've had two (with old batteries) where the UPS has heated up so that it's too hot to touch an the batteries have swollen so much they were difficult to remove.

The plugged in items that got damaged despite being switch off at the socket - was the socket single pole or double pole?

[alan potts]

I feel for you it happens a lot around here, the other night 3 storms all at once with lightning holding much more charge here than in the UK, I lost part of the laptop the other day with a strike 2 miles away. I never seem to learn, I have UPS on everything but I had a computer blow up about 3 years back, took out the motherboard but it was reapirable. The good thing is it don't seem to happen to often in England.

Unplug is the only way, must try and do it.