- Nov 27, 2001
- 30,383
- 912
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We had some bad storms roll through the other day, and a lightning strike close to my house caused some damage to my electronics. From what I can tell, the surge entered in through the coaxial line, went through my modem, and hit my Ethernet network. This leads me to a few different questions/thoughts...
Coaxial Grounding
At the coax's entry point to the house, there is a grounding wire that is attached to the coax run. I checked the continuity between the two, and it definitely is active. However, as we know, this ground run did not stop the surge at all. The ground run goes from the communications box about 8-10 feet to my electric meter where it is simply clamped to the box itself.
So, I guess I'm wondering... is this a good grounding method? I'm not an expert on this, but during my reading, one thing that was noted was that just because something is grounded doesn't mean a surge will take that path. This made me wonder if my ground connection would have been better if it was hooked to a nearby grounding stake rather than the electric meter.
Coaxial Surge Protection
One thing that I didn't do was protect my network lines beyond the original coax grounding line. I had always heard negative things about the coax protection in power strips, but I knew my APC UPS had the same functionality on it. I did a little reading on it, and APC states that it only degrades the signal by about 2dB. I did reroute my coax to run through the UPS before it goes to the modem; however, I was wondering how useful this would be in the end.
Ethernet Surge Protection
I also heard about Ethernet surge protection that is supposed to have minimal impact on performance. I picked up one of these to try out, and I figured I could attach it to my UPS's grounding screw. Although, I guess I'm not sure about the worth of these devices. So, I'm curious if anyone has had some experience with them.
Accepting Wireless
I think one thing that lead to me losing some equipment was likely my philosophy of "if it stays in one place, it goes on Ethernet". For example, my Denon A/V receiver shut off immediately after the lightning strike and entered Protect mode. Fortunately, there seemed to be no lasting damage that I saw. (I didn't check to see if the Ethernet port was ruined by the surge though.) I was thinking about it, and I realized that while the receiver does meet my aforementioned philosophy, it doesn't really need a faster connection due to it mostly using the network for firmware updates.
Unfortunately, while my AVR hasn't had any issues, I can't really say the same for my NUC. I used it on the back of a touch-capable monitor in the kitchen for recipes and such. While I did use the NUC for some multimedia (e.g. watching YouTube while cooking/baking), it never required a lot of bandwidth and would've been fine on WiFi. Although, this brings up another question... at least from my understanding, network surges don't often destroy computers due to Ethernet PHYs having fuses. The Ethernet port tends to die as a result, but the rest of the hardware is (usually) still good. (I did have a computer lose its Ethernet port too.) That makes me wonder... in reducing the size of the electronics on the NUC, did Intel eschew surge protection for the Ethernet port?
In the end, I was probably pretty lucky. The only dead device was my NUC8i5, which has unfortunately gone up in price $100 since I bought it. My modem did still mostly function after the surge; however, its LAN port would only operate at 100Mbps and it would sometimes just stop working correctly for a bit. I also had to replace a 16-port D-Link switch, but it had been giving me problems even before the lightning strike. (Ports would just stop working after power outages.) I was probably pretty lucky that my Ubiquiti network gear didn't kick the bucket. Although, I was a bit worried when my APs were acting up in the beginning. However, resetting power to them fixed any issues that I've seen. Although, the "WiFi Experience" listed in the UniFi Controller was in the 80% range for quite a while yesterday, and I noticed a number of retries. However, last I checked, it has been steadily back in the high 90's.
Coaxial Grounding
At the coax's entry point to the house, there is a grounding wire that is attached to the coax run. I checked the continuity between the two, and it definitely is active. However, as we know, this ground run did not stop the surge at all. The ground run goes from the communications box about 8-10 feet to my electric meter where it is simply clamped to the box itself.
So, I guess I'm wondering... is this a good grounding method? I'm not an expert on this, but during my reading, one thing that was noted was that just because something is grounded doesn't mean a surge will take that path. This made me wonder if my ground connection would have been better if it was hooked to a nearby grounding stake rather than the electric meter.
Coaxial Surge Protection
One thing that I didn't do was protect my network lines beyond the original coax grounding line. I had always heard negative things about the coax protection in power strips, but I knew my APC UPS had the same functionality on it. I did a little reading on it, and APC states that it only degrades the signal by about 2dB. I did reroute my coax to run through the UPS before it goes to the modem; however, I was wondering how useful this would be in the end.
Ethernet Surge Protection
I also heard about Ethernet surge protection that is supposed to have minimal impact on performance. I picked up one of these to try out, and I figured I could attach it to my UPS's grounding screw. Although, I guess I'm not sure about the worth of these devices. So, I'm curious if anyone has had some experience with them.
Accepting Wireless
I think one thing that lead to me losing some equipment was likely my philosophy of "if it stays in one place, it goes on Ethernet". For example, my Denon A/V receiver shut off immediately after the lightning strike and entered Protect mode. Fortunately, there seemed to be no lasting damage that I saw. (I didn't check to see if the Ethernet port was ruined by the surge though.) I was thinking about it, and I realized that while the receiver does meet my aforementioned philosophy, it doesn't really need a faster connection due to it mostly using the network for firmware updates.
Unfortunately, while my AVR hasn't had any issues, I can't really say the same for my NUC. I used it on the back of a touch-capable monitor in the kitchen for recipes and such. While I did use the NUC for some multimedia (e.g. watching YouTube while cooking/baking), it never required a lot of bandwidth and would've been fine on WiFi. Although, this brings up another question... at least from my understanding, network surges don't often destroy computers due to Ethernet PHYs having fuses. The Ethernet port tends to die as a result, but the rest of the hardware is (usually) still good. (I did have a computer lose its Ethernet port too.) That makes me wonder... in reducing the size of the electronics on the NUC, did Intel eschew surge protection for the Ethernet port?
In the end, I was probably pretty lucky. The only dead device was my NUC8i5, which has unfortunately gone up in price $100 since I bought it. My modem did still mostly function after the surge; however, its LAN port would only operate at 100Mbps and it would sometimes just stop working correctly for a bit. I also had to replace a 16-port D-Link switch, but it had been giving me problems even before the lightning strike. (Ports would just stop working after power outages.) I was probably pretty lucky that my Ubiquiti network gear didn't kick the bucket. Although, I was a bit worried when my APs were acting up in the beginning. However, resetting power to them fixed any issues that I've seen. Although, the "WiFi Experience" listed in the UniFi Controller was in the 80% range for quite a while yesterday, and I noticed a number of retries. However, last I checked, it has been steadily back in the high 90's.