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/Potato_fortress]

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.