(no subject)

[cellio]

Argh.

We returned home last night from D&D to find half the breakers in the upstairs sub-panel tripped. Ok, fine; there was a storm earlier (not a big one). One breaker would not go back on; hmm. After the rest went back on, we found some dead appliances. Oh joy. Power surge or lightning strike; how can we tell which? (No evidence of damage yet in the finished third floor. It's been raining all morning, so we have not attempted an inspection of the roof.)

Dead (so far):

• One VCR and TV; they and one other VCR were plugged into the same power strip ("with surge protection"); one VCR survived. Say what?
  
• One hub, but not the DSL modem and Linksys box upstream or (apparently) the computers downstream.
  
• One monitor (plugged into UPS!) -- or perhaps one graphics card; will do swaps later to determine.
  
• One microwave (has power, but display is dead).
  
• One alarm clock (clock works, but alarm does not; guess how we found out).

On the death "watch list": one air conditioner (entire outlet is dead; did it get that way by shorting our brand-new AC?), four computers.

The fridge is fine, so we have food rather than yucky smells. We have not inspected stereo equipment, computers (beyond cursory glances), and peripherals (scanner, printers, etc) yet. We have also not investigated other kitchen appliances, remaining air conditioners, furnaces, and assorted small gadgets.

I hope an electrician can see us today; I don't know what I can and can't trust.

Comments

[fiannaharpar.livejournal.com]

On the upside, Dani can get the new TV he wanted...

I'm sorry that things went wierd electrically. I hope that no further stuff went wrong and that it's just the graphics card on your monitor (you know, the cheap fix).

*hug*

Let us know how it goes with the electrician.

[cellio]

On the upside, Dani can get the new TV he wanted...

True.

I hope that no further stuff went wrong and that it's just the graphics card on your monitor (you know, the cheap fix).

Actually, given that we will almost certainly meet the deductible on the policy and thus make an insurance claim, I hope it's the monitor. I will feel much more confident with a replacement monitor; if it's the card, I will always wonder what else in the machine got zapped but will have delayed effects. I don't know enough about hardware to spot a problem before a fan or a hard drive or a sound card or whatever dies.

electrician

[cellio]

Our electician can't come today, but he can come first thing in the morning. I'd rather have someone who knows the wiring (and personally did some of it) tomorrow than a random yellow-pages pick today, so that's what we're doing. Tonight we will catalogue the damage for the insurance adjustor.

I'm borrowing a lightweight monitor from work to test with. These are not the circumstances under which I had hoped to test-drive LCD displays, but oh well. Tomorrow, I will bring the apparently-live VCR to work to test with a TV we have lying around here. (What I can tell now is that it has power, but I don't actually know if it plays or records. The microwave is testimony to the fact that this isn't necessarily an all-or-nothing proposition.)

[figmo.livejournal.com]

Wow.

There's some brand of power strip with surge protector that claims to guarantee $10k of surge protector insurance, as in "we'll replace up to $10k worth of equipment that was damaged if our surge protector doesn't do its job."

IMHO, that might be worth looking into.

[cellio]

Yeah, we just saw some of those last night while buying anew hub. I'm going to replace my UPS (it obviously didn't do its job), and I think it'll be with one of those.

(Sadly, the hub alone isn't the source of our lack of network. We replaced that last night and machines still aren't talking to each other or to the internet. That means some subset of: DSL modem (lights are on), Linksys firewall box (lights are on), and network cards (who can tell?).)

[cellio]

How prescient. Two computers and their monitors are having problems. I wonder how quickly I can get a replacement machine, ideally with the drivers and stuff pre-loaded. (The printer and scanner might be dead, too. The printer we can move to another machine and test; the scanner is SCSI and the only machine with a SCSI card is one of the ones that got hit, so we can't even test that.)

Our electrician recommended that we replace everything associated with the two computers that got zapped, and he thinks that's normal for insurance these days. I wonder how quickly we can get the adjustor to approve that. I want to be back online, dammit. And this isn't a case of my own stupidity nailing me; I did eveyrthing right -- UPS, intelligent distribution of power outlets/circuits, GFIs, etc.