by Ed Burnette
August 20th, 2008 @ 3:56 pm

In my last article I described what it feels like to have your house struck by lightning. Luckily there were no injuries or structural damage (thanks for your kind words in the comments), but our gadgets and other electronics inside the house weren’t so lucky. This is their tale.

The first thing I noticed was that my computer wouldn’t come on. I thought that was odd, since it’s a laptop that works on battery power. A catalog of all the files I had neglected to back up flashed before my eyes. Materials for a book, family photographs, personal documents. Some of it I could recover, some I couldn’t. Lesson learned. I glanced over at the wireless router. It was completely dead. Cycling the power didn’t help. What else? I was about to find out…

The kids and I walked around, trying everything else, assessing the damage. See the diagram above for a list. A dead Tivo box (the one with the lifetime service of course). A TV that wouldn’t come on at first, but eventually did. Another Tivo that worked fine. Numerous UPS and Surge protector boxes were no protection against the damage. I noticed it was getting warm upstairs and sure enough, the AC had been knocked out.

Every single GFI circuit in the house had been tripped. The garage door didn’t work, but resetting the circuit breaker fixed that. That gave me an idea about the laptop, so I replaced its battery and it came on. (I’ll get around to backing up those files real soon.) I keep finding things that are broken, like another TV has sound but no picture, and a mattress air pump that won’t.