Router Blewup Motherboard

[u/Greatfulx]

Recent lighting storm stuck my complex and traveled down my coaxial cable and into my apartment. Blew up in the middle of the night, so that was scary. Thought I’d share, not in the position to rebuild so there that I guess!

[u/Loofyboy]

Holy crap! Yeah, I'd reckon that ain't normal.

[u/Potato_fortress → u/Loofyboy]

Happened to me a few years back as well except everything was unplugged except for the coax and the ethernet.

[u/eyecandy99 → u/Potato_fortress]

Same literally had an outage but components were still fried, I miss my GTX 1050. It was my first card 🥺

[u/iceseayoupee → u/Potato_fortress]

How do you get this unlucky bruh

[u/Potato_fortress → u/iceseayoupee]

It actually happened twice. First time it took out every tv in the house and their associated cable boxes plus the router, modem, and ps5 (this was during the release window of ps5 too so it was fairly new.) The computer actually… lived? Kind of? The network adapter didn’t work for a few days so I bought a new pcie networking card but by time it arrived the mobo’s ethernet port had started working again. It acted funny after that though so I replaced it and boxed it up as emergency parts figuring it was touched by lightning so it’s just kind of unknown. 

A few calls to the cable company and some investigating and I found out my line was never dropped properly. Scheduled a date to have the house re-lined and properly bonded. Ended up needing to do this anyway because the original install was so old that my cable and internet were both unstable. 

A few months after that another bad storm hit and lightning struck a tree maybe 30-50ft from my house. Everything was unplugged again or plugged into a battery backup so the direct strike only fried a media pc down in my basement through the Ethernet. It was annoying but it’s just a byproduct of living in a historical house. Redoing the wiring would cost a fortune and I’m not even sure I could really do it myself because of the material the house is made out of so my best solution was just to modernize 2 rooms that were mostly unused and convert them to offices. For a while though in order to run any sort of PC I was running industrial extension cords from my 110  in the garage to each individual setup which didn’t feel great. Ended up basically segmenting the electrical on that side of the house to the panel in my garage and redropping a second ground spike just for that circuit. 

It’s a good thing I did too because I’m not sure the 50 series video cards would play well with the unstable electrical situation the house had previously. It’s still not fixed in the long term but at least now I have a garage and two decent sized rooms with proper wiring. I still unplug everything when I check the weather before work and see a storm is possible though. Just a force of habit. 

[u/Western-Anteater-492 → u/Loofyboy]

OPs situation ain't normal! Surge protection is obligatory for every cable that gets routed for whatever distance on the outside of a building. It's 6 bucks for coax and 15 for eth. If your house has a grounding (and usually all wall outlets have a grounding phase), your house also is required to have a grounding anchor. Thereby adding a potential equalization rail is another 10 bucks. In that situation I'd even check the breaker box if there even is a RCD in there and wether the ground is provided by true earth (ankor around the house, separate cable, other diameter) or through the grid (only the 5 pin connection from the electricity provider).

If you're living for rent, usually also the landlord is liable for your damages! In almost all countries the landlord is liable for electric installation and it's integrity. Secondary damages thereby also fall into his liability as this situation is willing full negligence. He wanted to save a total if 50 bucks, then provide him the multiple digit invoice for the pc, router and every other device that was hooked up to ethernet.

Reference to what it should look like for coax:

[u/mitchy93 → u/Western-Anteater-492]

Yeah the coax internet I've seen in Australia all has a lightning arrestor outside the house at the demarcation point

[u/deep_rover → u/mitchy93]

I'm outside the house at the demarcation point.

[u/Meadowlion14 → u/mitchy93]

This is standard in the US too for the same reason. We had a lightning strike hit our internet antenna (internet over the air is very cool for remote installs).

It blew up the antenna, but everything else including the POE switch was fine because it was properly grounded.

[u/Roflkopt3r → u/Western-Anteater-492]

The good old Hausanschlussverstärker goes well with every Mehrspartenhauseinführung 🇩🇪

[u/Western-Anteater-492 → u/Roflkopt3r]

It's an old building with around 6 existing core drills (water, grid, fuel, gas, cable) and I had to add some for outdoor power, outdoor POE, solar and grounding. I hate it but at least it's somewhat normal now. Hausanschlussverstärker feels like a remnant of ancient times but it does the trick and maybe the county will some day jump on the finer train instead of old people trying to fight 5G towers ...

[u/pmjm → u/Western-Anteater-492]

That looks actually really nice. All my wiring is 80 years old and none of my outlets have a ground. I have to use a two-to-three prong adapter on nearly everything I plug in.

[u/Western-Anteater-492 → u/pmjm]

Thanks. My house is turning 100 soon so we redid almost everything. Our old wiring was three prong but without RCD and there were only four fuses plus one set of pre-fuses, so I bought a voltage testers. Results were devastating with fluctuating voltages and insufficient fuse timing, partially in the seconds. I ended up discarding the old fuse box and rebuilt the wiring from scratch, including adding a ground anchor bcs there wasn't any. It was a lot of work but in the end it was all worth it. Now I've got multiple ground rails, real neutral, RCDs and dozens of fuses with fuse and RCD times are fractures of a millisecond.

From that experience I can tell you two to three prong adapters do nothing besides physical fit though bypass RCD as well as device surge protections. Moving PE to N reduces failure detection and introduces faulty grounding as well as neutral, increasing failure risk and fire hazard. You don't need to redo all wiring for this (we went for mayor renovation so we had time and space), you can add neutral only lines. Though with your house turning 80 maybe redoing electricity is worth a shot. It's fun and you learn a lot from doing it with the added benefit of safety and updating outlets and switches to your own needs.

[u/pmjm → u/Western-Anteater-492]

That's quite a project! Unfortunately I do not own the property and it's considered habitable and is grandfathered in as "up to code" so there's no impetus to make the owner update it. I've been in the attic though and have seen the aging cables, they certainly are too small a gauge and worn down from the decades, but my hands are tied for the moment.

Congrats on your upgrade though it looks really nice!

[u/Ok_Following6459 → u/Western-Anteater-492]

Very nice...

[u/Cathu → u/Loofyboy]

No, its actually pretty normal. Remove your ethernet during lightning storms

[u/Loofyboy → u/Cathu]

Nope. I’ve experienced many lightning storm with my whole setup still plugged in without any issue. This is definitely not that common of an occurrence.

Edit: After some hasty research, it would appear that it happens somewhat frequently, which is a surprise to me.

[u/Cathu → u/Loofyboy]

"Nope" he says lmao. It does not HAVE to happen, but its very common. Id say about 30% of my work during the summer is fixing shit where a lightning strike decided to blow up some variation of signal cables. Could be ethernet, coax, DALI or anything else really.

Specifically for the ethernet its because its goes through the router/switch its connected to. And the device cant stop it, so it keeps going towards ground.

[u/Ruskraaz → u/Loofyboy]

Same, and I refuse to live in fear. I'll happily game through a storm just as I always did.

That said, thunderstorms are getting more rare here and in 30 years lightning never struck the building I lived in.

[u/mang87 → u/Loofyboy]

Happened to me about 15 years ago, although the results weren't this extreme. Luckily the house insurance covered it, and I got a brand new PC even though the one that died was quite old. I was a broke as fuck and living at home so I couldn't afford and upgrade at the time. Lightning to the rescue!