Scott.Buffington.me

It seems to me that no matter what, when you first move into a new home that you are greeted with all kinds sudden emergencies. You know, suddenly the furnace does not work, a window leaks or the hot water heater suddenly go kaput.

When I purchased my first home in 1998, the hot water heater stopped working. The move this time saw us weather a lightning strike. Thursday evening just after arriving from work I thought I would see if I could get the lawn mowed. No sooner had I return from filling the gasoline containers and a storm rolled up. Scratch that, I guess it will have to wait. Julie and I are sitting in the family room and suddenly there is a loud boom outside the window. I actually saw a flash of lightning accompanied immediately by the very loud noise. All our wiring is underground, but I clearly could tell that something had happened, I could smell electrical burning in the air. All the coffee pots were without power, but the power was clearly on. All NO! I lost both my coffee pots!

I checked the breakers on the electrical box and they all looked good. It suddenly occurred to me that our electrical outlets have reset switches. I pushed them and the power returned to the coffee pots. I had to do the same thing for the outlets in the bathroom. Disaster avoided right?

Wrong! We noticed the garage door opener light came on and would not go off. Also the smell of electricity was heavy in the air. The garage door opener was just buzzing and would not function at all, something was fried. So I climbed up and disconnected it. Well, I suppose that is not too bad, a very close strike and all we lost was a garage door opener. Well, the story does not end there.

I have surge protectors on most of my electrical components. The computers booted up fine, but something seemed wrong. I could not connect to my Mac Mini. The desktop was up, but no network. The light on the card was not lit and the connection on the router was dead. I switched some cables around but to no avail. It seems my network card inside the Mini had also fallen victim to the lightning strike.

That being said, I think I am going to price having the Apple Store do a repair. The downfall of such a small computer is getting replacement parts and the pain it is to open the case and work with the small parts. Since the computer only cost $500 roughly, I certainly am hoping the bill is not too outrageous, if it is, it might be better to just try the repair myself.

A neighbor who was away during the storm said that they came home and their computers that had been powered off were actually turned on! So that confirmed that indeed a close strike occurred and we were probably very lucky that we did not lose any other electrical components. I will also be looking for surge suppressors for the cable line so that such a loss does not happen again.

UPDATE - Scratch that, it seems the Wireless router and a few of my cables have been fried. A connection directly from my modem to my Mac Mini resulted in success. I guess I am looking for recommendations for a new Wireless Router. A much cheaper and less painful alternative than a Mac Mini repair.