Pontoon Boat & Deck Boat Forum

You guys are so smart so your help would help. Few days A go we had a bad storm. down the street lighting hit a transformer. We never lost power. 2 breaker tripped. not the one the tv was on. the cable box went bad. the tv turns on get all the info for the menu up on the tv. we put a dvd player to it and get no signal (dvd player works on other tv). we also lost the controller the we can use are smart phone to open the garage door. the cost for new tv and controller not worth turning into insurance. No I did not have the tv on a surge protector . The tv is a 52" samsung plasma is there anything you guys think I could do to fix it. I will be pulling it down and taking it a part and seeing if I can fix it. the tv is in a spear room that we use 2-3 time a month. Any help would be good.

Your situation sounds a lot like what we faced last year when lighting struck "NEAR" the house... First off my biggest and newest TV a 60" got zapped and it WAS on a surge suppressor. My main sat box got zapped as did our WiFi router and phone as it too was plugged into the TV. All of this equipment was plugged into the same suppressor and it didn't matter one lick. Several other TV and sat mini boxes throughout the house were also gone. The oldest TV survived but lost an HDMI port out of it's bank of 5 although I'm told that it died just the other day... Most TV and consumer electronics are no longer designed to be repaired cost effectively and I live very rural so it was just not worth loading them up and driving an hour just to TRY and find a repair shop.... Lighting can come through cable, telephone, as well as sat dish just as well as it can your power wire... Also lost a golf cart battery charger as it was closest to the sat dish itself....

The above poster was right. Todays electronics are built to be tossed not repaired. Even if you have the skills to repair it, you most likely can't find parts.

Took a lightning hit the other day. I could get audio out of my home theater but no video. My receiver took the damage hit. A new receiver is a lot cheaper than a new plasma. My video guy is a real proponent for unplugging your system when there is a hint of bad weather. Surge protectors are not going to stop a lightning strike.

Did you try and claim against your homeowner's policy? You might get a replacement.

I have fixed LCD tvs that died by replacing blown capacitors. Not real hard to do. The bad ones are bulged on top. However lightning can fry a lot of components so it could be finished.

HDMI ports are extremely sensitive to transients (shocks). My Onkyo surround sound receiver, which was damn expensive, has lost the HDMI board once. On my receiver, it was worth paying to have fixed. Cheaper units are not worth the trouble.

I know a lot of guys are in favor of "surge suppressors". But I am an electrical engineer, and I find them to be a joke. It's just a MOV (metal oxide varistor) across the hot and neutral. At normal voltages, the resistance is so high that it does not conduct and it's like it ain't even there. But let the voltage get high enough and it will switch over to conducting and will short the hot and neutral together, tripping the breaker and blowing the MOV to hell. Guys will see the smoking ruin of the surge suppressor and think "Wow! That thing just saved my bacon!" In reality, in the 20 or so cycles of over-voltage electricity that gets thru before the breaker trips will let a lot of damage get done. The surge suppressor might provide a small amount of protection over a long-duration event, but its almost useless most of the time.

If you want to really protect your stuff, A battery back-up UPS works great. It rectifies the incoming AC into DC, stores it in the battery, and then chops the DC back to AC to feed the equipment. Any "surge", over, or undervoltage will be absorbed by the UPS, and not sent thru to the equipment. A near lightning strike might blow the UPS up, but your equipment will be ok.

I now have a Tripp Lite SMART1500LCDT on my theater. It even isolates and protects the TV cable if you want to. It costs about $165 bux and will save your stuff from just about anything up to a direct lighting strike.

http://www.neweggbusiness.com/Product/P ... HwodBE8JuQ

Tim