Well it’s now officially summer and of course Wimbledon has started and that can mean only one thing -rain. And lots of it. It’s not the rain we are concerned about though, it’s the lightning storms.
I love watching the lightning. As soon as a storm brews I’m at the window or the front door watching for the flash and waiting for the rumble. Once I was lucky enough to witness a fairly local strike, which took your breath away.
No wonder too. The average lightning strike heats the air to three times the temperature at the surface of the sun and packs an instantaneous hit of power of about one terawatt. That is 1,000,000,000,000 Watts. Wow. Your surge protection strips, rated at 2000 or 3000 Joules, pale into insignificance compared to an actual lightning strike of about 500 Million Joules of Energy, which means you’ll need about 166,000 to cope with it.
Of course, practically nothing except for lightning conductors cope with a direct lightning strike. Over 30,000 Amps can flow which will fry all but the most lowest of impedance conductors. What’s more, is that the extreme electric fields generated induce voltages onto telecom and power lines. These can be damaging and is what your surge strips and Uninterruptible Power Supply or UPS systems will protect (to a greater or lesser extent) you from.
Power lines are particularly susceptible, and lightning strikes to these cause protection relays to activate, momentarily cutting power, as well as sending all sorts of power line transients straight into your electronic systems.
So, unless you want to have to unplug everything at the first sign of dark clouds overhead, it makes sense to connect a UPS to your computer, or home entertainment system. With the prices of an entry level system here at UPSMart being about £30 it’s completely crazy not to do so.
