Hdmi surge protection suggestions

jammy420

Adept
Hi,

Can we have discussion running about protection from HDMI surges? What options are there and any successful devices that you use at your home?

I connect NUC to LED TV.
 
what surge are you talking of? hdmi cannot send power surge. it only has a +5V pin for power. any extra power would be due to the tv or nuc not being grounded properly.

i have a nuc and i think i know what you're saying. If you touch the hdmi or any other cable you get a small pin prick type shock. that's because the nuc does not have a 3 pin power adapter. intel in their cheapskate ways have given only a 2 pin adapter. so i just soldered a wire to an empty 3.5mm plug's ground pin on one end and attached the other end of wire to the earth pin of an empty plug. Then i put that 3.5mm plug into the back 3.5mm port of the nuc to ground it. Its probably a bad way to do things but i don't see any 3 pin adapters for the nuc on sale. No shock from the nuc or tv or anything else connected to the nuc's usb ports. TV+nuc+android box all connected to same surge adapter powered by apc ups.
 
I am sorry, I didn't give more background.

[ It's nothing to do with NUC. My NUC adapter is adaptable to both 2 pins and 3 pins. In fact, they gave at least 6-7 varieties of plugs]

Earlier I had connected my desktop PC to my AOC TV. a couple of times, the HDMI sockets of both TV and motherboard went dead. No display to/from both Mobo and TV. The other HDMI socket of TV which I didn't use worked well. We really didn't know what is the issue then. AOC repaired my TV twice and when the second time it occurred, thankfully AOC gave a full refund and took the TV back. ASUS replaced my motherboard twice. The third time, I was lazy and just bought an HDMI to VGA adapter.

And maybe the fourth or third time, It was with the new LG TV. thankfully this time only the Mobo got hit. TV socket was safe.

HDMI surges are real. at least there are separate HDMI surge protectors on market. Recently shifted from PC to NUC. NUC/PC doesn't matter I guess. This is HTPC for my parents.
 
But I think it's safe to connect hdmi between monitors and gpu without shutting down both nor it is feasible everytime to check connectivity.
 
Never ever connect HDMI cables when the TV/monitor is ON. Learnt this the hard way when my PS4 went kaput.

Earlier I had connected my desktop PC to my AOC TV. a couple of times, the HDMI sockets of both TV and motherboard went dead.

I've done this countless times when I was testing hdmi cables (coincidentally) to my AOC monitor which has 2 hdmi ports and a vga port. The monitor, the nuc, android box and the tv are all working fine.
I searched the web and all the surges are due to electrostatic discharge or lightning. None of them are fault of hdmi cables. The hdmi cables have a metal sheath which act like ground. If your grounding is not proper or any of the electronic devices have a residual leak in them and leak electricity and there is no direct ground for that device, then anything connected to the metal parts will start conducting electric current. The leak could be in the order of millivolts from TV, pc, audio system, tv stb - anything which has just 2 pins. TV stb is one of the main problem maker which leaks current.

Buying expensive surge protector won't help if you don't ground the devices properly. Where will the surge power go to if its not connected?
 
Very true. If your earthing sucks then no matter what expensive surge or other electrical components you buy they all gonna show zero result or even damage themselves.
My home has proper earthing so I randomly plug in out any cable and it never affected any of my devices till date.
Already lost my gpu and tv in lightning strike 12yrs ago.
 
Earth ground is (probably) totally unrelated to what causes HDMI damage. Implied is existence of a floating ground. 6Pack described how he corrected that problem related to a completely different ground - safety ground (ie in a wall receptacle).

In another case, AOC and Asus replaced a failure without bothering to define why it happened. That 'why' is always essential - and not only with electronics.

This is also why informed consumers spend almost nothing for and use a digital meter - to see why failures happened and then eliminate the external reason for that internal damage.
 
Even if the surge traveled the HDMI line, that's still a secondary event. More likely is that both devices took separate surges from the same event. In either case you would be better off making sure *every* outside line was surge protected since that would mitigate the source of the problem rather than a secondary effect.
 
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