DCAudioDIY.com

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Walt

Did they install a surge protector on the coax going into the house?

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Walt

At different times I had both Dish and Direct TV and they both had surge suppressors on the coax on the outside of the house at the point of entry with weather boots on the connectors and a separate ground connection.

In Baltimore, we only have one choice and that is the dreaded Comcast. They have the monopoly if you want a hard connection. Satellite seems to have too many problems, especially with weather and poor speeds.
I have had Comcast out a few times over the 15 or so years, and the quality of service varies greatly. The last guy was a good one and redid the shoddy workmanship of the previous dudes. and we did all the terminations both outside and inside. The poor connections were causing all kinds of problems both for me and the neighborhood. Recently we started having downtimes at least once a week.
I have solved the problem (so far) by putting a timer that reboots the cable modem every night.

Pretty ugly. My FIOS fiber here has been great.

As you well know, if a direct lightning strike occurs, all bets are off. The best we can hope for is to protect against HV/HF spikes either entering the property via power , data, antenna or communications wiring. It is not enough to protect only at the point of entry to the premises, secondary protection is required in the building: certainly at subpanels, but also at point-of-use for critical and expensive gear/appliances/etc. This is needed because a close-by strike will mean induced voltages everywhere.

To that end, a variety of suppressors (including power line and coaxial) should be employed at point-of-entry along with a second set of suppressors right where cables connect to anything you cringe at buying again: air conditioner controls, laundry and kitchen appliances, everything networked via copper, televisions, etc.

The links I sent have a large variety of gear available. Not just POE and Ethernet protectors, unless I sent the wrong links. And that is always a possibility, just like lightning striking.

Stuart

In one of our buildings in Chicago, a 5 story steel and concrete structure, one day the building took a direct lightning strike and the steel in the structure channeled it to ground. There was no problem in the mains wiring, but all of our terminals on the counters stopped working. We discovered that the lightning current going through the building steel made the building act like the primary of a transformer. Even though the coupling to the data lines of the terminals was not very good, with the magnitude of current in the building steel, there was enough induced voltage in the data lines to destroy the input data boards. As Stuart said, we then added protectors on the data lines as well. In a regular residence, if you take a direct hit from lightning, things tend to vaporize. Surge protectors are of no help in that case.

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Walt

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Walt