The lightning strike
Posted by: Willy on 24 May 2014
Last Monday while the "soft southerners" were basking in glorious sunshine it was raining cats and dogs up north. As evening approached I heard the first rattle of thunder. Arose from my computer, removed record from turntable (Don Giovanni if anyone's interested), powered down and unplugged mains.
Storm got worse and a couple of close strikes tripped the mains but no damage. Around 6:15 at exactly the moment I switched on the kettle there was an almighty bang, a flash from the consumer units, and then silence. Checked out the consumer units and could see no visible damage. Switched them on again (eyes shut just in case) and all appeared to be fine. Further investigation revealed no telephone and no internet. No sign of life from the broadband router. Plugged in the emergency corded handset and still no dialtone.
Eventually managed to get i touch with BT, usual joy of a call centre person working to a script to diagnose a problem when I already knew what it was, and a BT engineer booked for the following day. BT arrived, replace the master socket and all tested well. Plugged the Dect phone in and it didn't test well. New phone required. Spare BB router installed and we were once again connected to the outside world......except in my office.
The house is half single storey and half twin storey with a 16 port switch in each of the two attics. A single ethernet (smuggled into the conduit for the alarm cables:-)) connects the two switches. It was clear from the the indicator lights on the switches that this link wasn't linking. Quickly tried the adjacent port but no joy.
New dect phone base station arrived yesterday and phones are once again fully operational (though there was probably some fitness benefit to be had from everyone dashing to the one phone in the bedroom every time it rang).
Just spent a couple of hours this morning doing some further troubleshooting and all is now operational. Seems the strike took out port 1 & 3 on both my ethernet switches. Have a few spare ports anyway.
So net damage from strike, one telephone master socket, one BT Homehub5, one Siemens A510a dect phone and 2 ports on each of the two gigabit switches.
Hifi powered up since Tuesday and singing like nothing ever happened.
Willy.