Always. Last year my neighbors' TV set got fried during a thunderstorm. In the house I grew up in, half of the electrical system and 10 square meters of roof tiles had to be replaced from a lightning bolt striking the house. An electrical sort of ball of fire came out from a wall socket and almost fried my mom during the same episode. Really scary.
Occasionally. If it's a really bad storm with lightning, etc., I will unplug my amps from the wall. They are the most (relatively) expensive components I own.
Step a) Unplug all expensive gear Step b) Sit on your deck, turn on cheap sht all in 1 music setup and watch that storm Step c) Pour some vodka and light a couple cigars (Whole house surge protection...whatever...won't do diddly squat when that lightning pays you a visit)
Unplugging the amps will protect the speakers as well. I’ll unplug the amp as the plug is within reach. The rest would require moving equipment to get to the plugs behind.
Yes! All components are plugged into a single surge/filter protector chassis...thus one master plug with easy access is my insurance guarantee! Ted
I disconnect and unplug the entire audio / video system, always and necessarily. I disconnect and turn off the router / modem and the Internet, all computers and PC equipment, even the home gas water heater! I reject all the stories about how it is not necessary. Let whoever wants be "brave" ... there are no brave people when lightning strikes, we should keep that in mind. Always! I have had bad experiences with this earlier in life.
I experienced a strong thunder strike 17-18 meters near me. It was one night 20 years ago, during a severe storm and thunderstorm. I was outside and watching a blue fireball of electric current 1 meter in diameter slowly disappear into the ground for a few minutes. A scene I don't want to experience again Due to the force of the impact, alarms were activated on 2 of my cars (they were turned off), but also on all cars in the immediate neighborhood. A neighbor in the house landed a few feet off the bed as if someone had thrown it. Some electrical appliances turned on, some old radio receivers started playing on their own from the impact ... like in horror movies
Living in central Florida means having to deal with this stuff almost daily in the summer. I've been unplugging things for decades but with SO many interconnected components, it's hard to completely isolate your gear from the outside world. Any wire that comes in from the outside is a path for electricity. I've used Monster Power units off and on for years but always had the same question: How would you know if the unit had done its job? If it suppressed a minor strike, the unit gives no indication that it may now be "compromised" or weakened. I finally quit using those expensive units and bought one of their "filtered" outlet strips and unplug that when storms get really nasty.
Neither of you seems to have had a bad experience with thunder. Fortunately. Thunder is nice to hear while far or high. But when lightning strikes 15-20 meters away (1.5 million Volts and who knows how many Amperes of electricity) - I think that the beauty is lost in an instant and the search for a safe part of the house begins Edit: I live in a part of Croatia where very intense thunderstorms are pronounced in summer. The risk of burning the devices, which we would have if we did not disconnect the devices from the electricity network, is very high. Recently, the practice has been introduced that Telecom operators via SMS warn the population about the upcoming thunderstorms and advise unplugging equipment and unplugging Internet / telephone cables.
I was engulfed in a wind swirl (a kind of mini tornado) at the countryside once, when I was a teen. It took me 2 meters up into the air and 20 meters sideways, where it deposited me abruptly. I was all bruised up an covered in dry dirt from the landing but miraculously no broken bones. Doubt anyone else here experienced something that weird ever.
Everything is plugged into a Furmann power filter. I turn the power filter off if we are going to have a particularly nasty electrical storm. My house is properly grounded, so I should be good unless lightning hits my house directly.
I don't usually. Sometimes the power flickers on and off repeatedly like someone is flipping a switch. In that case I do. I am amazed at how many people do unplug.
For years I kept a conditioner in the system with the appropriate protections against power surges. I recently bought a PS Audio P20 regenerator which offers similar protection (and absolutely performs the incoming power first aid as advertised!)
i turn off the power strip if there's active lightening in the area or if i see that there's going to be a thunder storm while i'm out
No. I don’t think it’s a bad idea to be cautious, but I don’t bother, mostly because chances are good I’m actually using it at the time, unless and until the power goes out. In the unlikely event a lightning strike actually hurts anything, that would surely suck. I’m just not that worried about it.
I generally do not, unless the radar is showing colors that should not be used for radar ("oh, pink? Time to start unplugging"), or we start seeing power flicker. Like a lot of folks who grew up in the midwest, thunderstorms are a regular part of life for a large portion of the year, so I'm probably not as cautious as I should be, though I do have surge protectors on all the A/V stuff and the computers to protect against smaller surges. (All the network connections are done via wi-fi, so a strike on either internet connection just takes out a modem.) I did see a lightning strike blow the crap out of a PBX switch at college (or, more properly, saw the strike from halfway across campus and saw the aftermath in the switch and phones the next morning), and that was something. Yeah, I keep a slide rule around for just such an occasion - while I'm not going to be doing any serious trig on it, I am at least facile enough to do multiplication and division, and extract square and cube roots, in case I have to cobble together a substitute resistor array for an amp during a power outage or something....
I used to pull power in NY- the infrastructure there was old and temperamental. Here in Texas, the infrastructure is far newer (except for that Big Freeze back in '21) and in addition to whole house surge, my main system runs off a big isolation transformer with an additional surge board, so unless it is a crazy storm, I don't pull power. FWIW, my suspicion is that no matter what "protection" you have, with a close or direct strike, all bets are off. That said, in the many years I've been doing this, never had an issue. Powering down is not the same as disconnecting, and disconnecting means everything that goes into a wall socket or power strip.
