Of the most important parts of electronics, one might venture to assume that electricity is probably up pretty close to the top of the list. In a true calamity almost a week ago, I learned a very important lesson relating to electronics and electricity, one that computer users everywhere need to hear: about power surges. It may just save you a considerable amount of money one day.
It is common practice to protect expensive equipment such as TVs and computers from electrical surges with surge protectors. I practiced this very well. All the desktops in my house were connected to surge protectors. All the TVs in the house were likewise connected. However, there were two things that were not protected: one Ethernet switch, and the cable lines. The results of these two devices not being connected may surprise you.
First off is the Ethernet switch. It was used as a patch panel in my basement; connecting one room upstairs to the router in my room, as well as another switch in the family room. It cost me a $10 when I purchased it. This doesn’t meet the requirement of "expensive," so I never thought anything of it and I left it unprotected.
The cable lines were something I never considered protecting. Sure, Coax cable can carry electricity, and sure, it could probably catch a surge, but I had never heard of it happening, so I never even considered protecting these.
Big mistake.
I wake up one morning and discover that my router and modem were powered off. Strange. I check to make sure everything is plugged in, and it is. I unplug the router and plug it back in. Still no power. I go into the garage to check the breakers and discover that three are tripped. I flip them back on, and return into my room to see if that fixed the problem — which I soon found it did not.
This isn’t good.
The next place I check is in our furnace room, the location of the aforementioned switch; again, no power. I walk out to the family room and discover, to my disbelief, that my wireless access point is also dead, along with my cable box. I walk upstairs, and soon find that the computer in that room is dead as well.
This isn’t looking good at all. What happened, you might wonder?
That night, we had an extremely electrical thunderstorm, and our power line happened to get a direct hit from lightning. Everything in the house that was valuable was ok, because they were all on surge protectors. Everything but that one computer was just fine.
An unprotected surge began on the switch down in the furnace room, which (to my surprise) carried over the 4 switched Ethernet ports, which carried to my router, access point, and the computer upstairs — frying all of the above. Also, another surge went over the cable line, causing damage to the first split of it (our HDTV cable box).
That $10 switch in our basement caused almost $300 worth of damage. Needless to say: the moral to the story is to be sure every electronic device in your house is on a surge protector. Those $10 surge protector units may be expensive up front, but they shy in comparison to the cost of repairing your equipment. I would even go a step further and get ones with cable surge protection as well, to completely safeguard your TVs.
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