On Jul 14, 21:40, Eric Chomko wrote: Yes, I've had it happen. Over here, the mains is usually fed from a three-phase transformer, with every third house on the same phase. A few years ago, I was watching the storm pass overhead (I like watching lightning) when the house three along from me had a direct hit on their TV aerial. There was a huge BANG!. The damage to their house was extensive: part of the aerial was vapourised, a few other things melted, much of the electrical equipment in the house was damaged in some way. Almost every burglar alarm in the street went off, and two (on the same supply phase) were wrecked. I wasn't so badly off. The bang was so loud I'd jumped hard enough make a picture fall off the wall. One monitor went bang and stopped working so I pulled its plug. My alarm went off but I was able to reset it. When I'd done that, I had a quick look round to see if anything was on fire, but although a few things had obviously stopped working, nothing looked like it needed immediate attention so I went to help the neighbours with their alarm (there are two old couples whose houses I sometimes look after if they're away). When I came back about an hour later I had a more thorough look. One of a pair of identical modems was fried; the other one was fine. The cordless phone never worked again, but the answering machine on the same line was apparently OK (though it never worked quite as well). The TV and video both died. There was a strong burnt PCB smell in the lounge, which turned out to be the remains of the satellite tuner, which was still drawing power and slowly melting. The monitor that had gone bang was a complete mess inside, and was a write-off, though the one next to it was fine, as was the Acorn Archimedes it was connected to. A PDP-11/34 in the garage had stopped, it turned out that the big input filter on the control box had burnt out. The TV company declared the video recorder to be irrepairable, and the engineer who looked at the TV said it was rather black inside, but they took it away and repaired it -- apparently they ended up changing almost every board inside and it was ages before they brought it back (we had a loan set in the meantime). But if you're thinking of relying on surge suppressors to protect your precious items from a lightning strike: _don't_. They're intended to protect from the spikes induced by nearby lightning discharges, not a direct hit or a strike that hits a nearby transformer or the supply. My PDP-11 is the testament to that. -- Pete Peter Turnbull Network Manager University of York