On Sunday 11 April 2004 05:14 pm, John Wilson wrote: > On April 11, 2004 06:58 am, Anne Wilson wrote: > > One caveat, Steve. We had a telephone wire going round the outside of > > the house like that. One day we had a thunderstorm, lightning found > > the cable, and the whole system (including a mini-switchboard setup) > > was fried. > > > > Anne > > My guess, Anne, is that someone either bypass the circuit protection on the > telephone lines to run the wiring or it wasn't grounded properly. That > should never have happened. > > I do this for a living and I've run wire around the outside of buildings in > climates where thunder and lightening are a dime a dozen and I've yet to > have this happen to anything that I've installed. Where I have seen it > happen is where either the protection has been bypassed or the ground has > been severed. > > For your own piece of mind get that part of the entrance to your house > checked or you might end up with a fire if you get hit by lightening again. > > ttfn > > John
John: Thunderstorms are quite common here. (Matter of fact, the weather guys say that they are likely tonight, tomorrow and possibly Tuesday.) In the 37 years that I've lived here, the only lightning damage that we've ever suffered came in on the telephone drop. It took out my shiny brand new 2400 baud external modem, an answering machine and two telephones; the guy across the street ended up with a shattered pine tree (60 ft?) in his yard. Evidently the stroke hit the tree, jumped to the telco drop to his house (it passed through the tree's limbs), and decided that all that copper was another neat way to get to ground. I called BellSouth to ask them to check out the protection block; their response was pretty much, "Stuff happens. Deal with it." SOP around here is that whenever there's lightning in the area, the PCs are shutdown, the power cords and modem lines are disconnected from the wall, and we only use cordless phones. Since then, I've talked to many others who have also had lightning damage via the phone lines. A few have had also had hits on the power lines. Curiously, no one has ever mentioned a lightning problem with cable TV. -- cmg
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