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Paralel
join:2011-03-24
Michigan, US

Paralel to Zoder

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to Zoder

Re: Lightning Damage

That's weird. Aren't the gel surge arrestors used in the iNID setups? That's what mine is using in a regular NID when they installed the UVerse.
DarienRedSox
join:2013-02-10
Darien, CT

DarienRedSox

Member

There are Lighting protesters in the iNID but they don't always work depend upon the power of the strike. I had half my iNID die when a surge came through on one line, was not strong enough to take out the other equipment and the iNID was able to run fine off of one line, I did not notice until a tech was fixing something else and tests kept on failing.
Zoder
join:2002-04-16
Miami, FL

Zoder to Paralel

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Well it probably was not a direct hit as that likely would have fried everything. connected to the i38 as Xsk8er pointed out. I'm lucky my gaming rig did not completely blow out.

I know the inid had a ground wire running from the box but it appears that isn't enough.

Now I'm concerned with keeping uverse unless it can be secured properly.

If I connect a lightning arrester between the ethernet ports and my personal networked equipment will that create a ground loop because the inid is already grounded? What about the power portion? if the surge travels from the cat5 cable of the inid to the power supply and i38 the surge will likely spread to the power plugs on those pieces? Does the APC UPS work both ways? Does it arrest the surge coming from the wall only or does it also arrest the surge backfed into the UPS power ports from overloaded equipment?

I did ask the phone techs about this but it's not something they are trained on, so they couldn't offer much help. He did claim when he asked around that the ground wire on the inid should be enough. So I asked him at that point about compensation since it obviously did not do that. He could not issue a damage claim but he was able to get me a 1 month credit which will pay for the replacement NIC and part of a new router. So that was good.

We did discover today our 2nd POTS line is not working. But we don't remember if we used it last night before the tech showed up. The caller id is blank between that time period. So it either got killed too or it was not reconnected properly when the tech swapped the inid.

mackey
Premium Member
join:2007-08-20

mackey

Premium Member

Unfortunately with lightning the only thing certain is nothing's certain. The strike doesn't need to actually hit anything to blow stuff up. Back when I had Comcast I took a "very close by" strike which blew out a single LAN (not the WAN) port in my router and the network card in the computer attached to that port. Nothing else was damaged. The cable modem, the rest of the router, and all other equipment still worked fine. That one cable just happened to be the right length and right orientation to pick up the EMP from the lightning.

If you just get a network cable surge protector and nothing else you're just wasting you time and money. All surge protectors need a solid, low impedance path to ground, and the ground pin on your electrical outlet is not gonna cut it.

The surge protector in the APC should work both ways as it's nothing but a MOV across hot/neutral/ground.

/M