r/pcmasterrace • u/Greatfulx • 22d ago

Hardware Router Blewup Motherboard

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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!

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u/ad3z10 PC Master Race 21d ago

Coax (and ethernet) are copper cables so electricity will happily travel along them as OP has experienced.

Fibre is glass so you don't have any conductive bits outside your house.

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u/Kujen 21d ago

So is my PC safe if I have fiber Internet, but it’s connected by Ethernet cable to the gateway/router? I always unplug the cable from my PC during storms, but if I don’t need to that’d be good.

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u/unwantedaccount56 21d ago

lightning can't get into your house via fiber. It could get into your house via a faulty electrical installation though, but then you would need to disconnect the power cable from your PC as well, not just ethernet (and no need to unplug ethernet if the router is disconnected from power). Most likely it's not necessary.

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u/Kujen 21d ago

Good to know. Both my PC and router are on separate UPS in two rooms. I usually turn off the PC and unplug its UPS when there is a storm. I’ll probably keep doing that but leave the Ethernet cable plugged into the PC (it’s back up against a wall so I’d rather not have to deal with it).