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Lightning Strike Advice Please

My pride and joy has been severly nuked by lightening strike to my house, before you start I had a surge protector, but it was on my hifi and tv which worked a treat so I recommend them 101%, anyway back to the issue
The power supply appears to be a bit faulty and the motherboard burns when switched on (however the green led light on the board still comes on), cpu fan twitches and thats it, no beeps, nothing.
House insurance covers it all ok, but do you think by changing the board and power supply only I may be ok, or do you think the cpu and memory is also nuked? What about pci cards, hard drive and dvd drives, is it wise to change everything?
The pc was off at the mains at the time, but plugged in (oh and the monitor is dead)
 
Do you have a spare PC you can test all the components in? If not, it may be worth just getting a new PC.. I'd be wary of using old components.
 
English Guy, this post seems rather familiar as the self same thing happened to my brother-in- laws computer, to cut a long story short after stripping his machine down to test individual parts etc and only to find everything was knackered, motherboard looked fine as did all other parts except for the psu in which the pots had melted leaving a treacle like substance and the smell of burntness, insurance company would not pay out because the word fire was not written on the claim form.
Eventually built a new machine for him and made sure anti surge plugs were fitted in line, not much help i know but what an experiance. regards jv.
 
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your pc components are rated at between 12 and 0.8v, the lightning strike at 100,000volts or more, i dont think there is much chance of anything working.
BTW lightning usually comes in via the phone line rather than the mains, unless you are on an overhead power line, so it would enter via the modem, frying that and everything else on the pci bus before spreading via the mobo.
Be thankfull the smoothing caps in the PSU didnt explode and turn it into a fireball, the burning smell is almost certainly the oil from these bubbling out of the casings.
 
Silly question - but if your on cable does it still happen as bad? bearing in mind it's all underground?
 
The surge got to the pc like this:
Came through the roof, found a phone extention lead and earthed out on that blowing the phone socket black, frying the homehighway isdn box where it came up the mains lead and into the mains, blowing all on the ring (except the surge protected items)
The weird thing is the power supply doesnt smell burnt, nor are there any burnt marks on the isdn pci card.
Guess i will just replace it all to be safe
 
Captain_Cretin said:
your pc components are rated at between 12 and 0.8v, the lightning strike at 100,000volts or more, i dont think there is much chance of anything working.
BTW lightning usually comes in via the phone line rather than the mains, unless you are on an overhead power line, so it would enter via the modem, frying that and everything else on the pci bus before spreading via the mobo.
Be thankfull the smoothing caps in the PSU didnt explode and turn it into a fireball, the burning smell is almost certainly the oil from these bubbling out of the casings.

It would not have got zapped at 10KV. Lighting Surge Protection only helps with secondary strikes not primary. If you line gets a direct hit no surge protector will help. A direct strike would kill pratcially every appliance in the house as well as posible structural damage.
 
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lightning voltage is 1 to 5 million volts or more, 100,000 is a conservative estimate of what can spike down the lines; i personaly measured a 50kv spike on the mains at a factory i was working at durring a thunderstorm, luckily it lastest only milliseconds.
( I'd left a meter recording peak levels overnight to check out for problems with some new welding equipment that ran at high voltage/high frequency to check nothing was leaking through to the control panels and found the spike on the reords in the morning).
To answer helpers question, a buried cable is safest from surges, as lightning takes the path of least resistance, it will go (as you know) for anything taller than its surroundings, such as telegraph poles, pylons or trees; it was recommended many years ago, that all power cables be buried, but the power compaines said it would be too expensive.
As said above, a direct hit on your house and nothing will stop it and parts of the house will explode where the hit occurs.
 
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