On Strike: Lightning and Your Tech

I love a good thunderstorm. Maybe it’s the crack of the thunder, maybe it’s the sound of driving rain, maybe it’s the bright flash of lightning as it streaks across the sky. Disengaging caveman brain for a moment however and remembering that I am in fact a technology professional, thunderstorms are a major pain in my proverbial. This lightning and the subsequent power outages are awful for electronics and, as we fill our homes with ever more sensitive flavors of such, they can get expensive if we don’t take the proper care. Let’s perhaps consider how we might mitigate these risks, preventing the rapid release of magic smoke from our favorite home tech items!

Lightning is of course made of electricity. The movement of moisture within a storm cloud causes a negative charge to gather at the bottom of the cloud, while a positive one gathers at the top. When intra-cloud or cloud-to-cloud lightning occurs, we see the electrical arc between these charges either within a single cloud, or between two respectively. The real problems arise with cloud-to-ground lightning, when the negatively charged bottom of that cloud becomes attracted to the positively charged earth we like to live and build things on. This discharge, while spectacular to look at, is quite lazy; it will attempt to take the path of least resistance on its journey down from the sky. When that path happens to mean traveling through a building, a tree or a power line, the risk of damage becomes pretty substantial.

These surges of power are the enemy of the devices we use to learn, work, be entertained and communicate with. Anything designed to be plugged into a normal wall outlet in North America runs on 120 volts. There’s some tolerance engineered in, because seldom do we see precisely 120, but it’s close enough. A lightning strike by contrast can be hundreds of millions of volts. While there are safeguards built into the electrical grid to prevent the power from a strike traveling through overhead lines to your home, it does occur; and it doesn’t take very much of that multimillion volt strike to start frying things. What’s most at risk then and how do we prevent device death resultant from an angry sky?

By far the safest (and cheapest) method of protection is simply unplugging things. Computers, laptops, televisions and high-end audio equipment are all vulnerable to these sudden higher-than-rated voltages. As it happens, the official advice from The Department of Homeland Security is simply to disconnect things from the wall. Cheapness be damned, it’s unlikely any of us are going to follow this. The next-best thing then is to deploy surge protectors, rather than connecting things directly to the wall. Handily, these surge protectors are sold with a rating as to the level of protection they offer, this rating is measured in “joules.” To keep things simple, I like to give the advice that anything which holds data should be on a good quality surge protector: 1,500 joules or more for televisions/streaming boxes/speakers, 2000 or more for anything resembling a computer.

You can of course go one step further and deploy a UPS, or Uninterruptible Power Supply. This will give you both surge protection plus the benefit of a short, battery powered run time for your devices when the power is out. A great idea for business machines, or those which would take great effort or financial outlay to replace. The key I think is to make sure, especially this time of year, the electronics we sometimes take for granted are appropriately protected from nature’s spiteful zaps.