Having TV on during rain

jammy420

jammy420

Adept
It is a Indian parents thing to switch off the TV while it is raining. And it is valid till the days we had antennas.

Does thunder strikes somewhere nearby affects dish TV and in turn the TV?

also, we dont have dish anyway. we have Jio fiber. So Is it safe to watch TV during rains and thunders if you have Fiber STB?. I gave the explanation and said it should be fine. but anyway, if there is a thunder strike in next street , it will still be a problem . right?
 
Erm no? Any modern and half competent installations are electrically well grounded which means there's no major risk of thunderstorms damaging equipment or devices. Same thing applies to fiber. These are well insulated. So unless your stuff is ancient you probably don't run the risk of damaging it during rains and thunderstorms.
 
I have this question too, for a rather long time. Whenever there's a thunderstorm I get scared (due to mum's persistence fear putting for decades and I finally submitted) and turn off my PC firstly, then other electrical equipment as well. By turn off I mean I unplug them from the board. Our house is not grounded. We have electric supply from CESC. I don't know much about these things, but would like to know whether I should panic using electrical stuffs during a thunderstorm. I did have my ethernet port along with the router fried during a thunderstorm though, and my PC was off. Later I was told that the spike came in through the router and further travelled through the RJ45 damaging the ethernet. This was back in 2016 with copper connection. Also, there have been many stories around my neighbourhood wherein TVs, fridges etc. got fried during thunderstorms.
 
A surge can come through any of the means, whether it is a direct strike or an indirect strike. Both govt and home installations are less than ideal and can have a lot of faults. Just recently adaptors of my routers got fried when lightning hit a nearby area and surge came in through the govt supply. It is very common in our area and we have had some damage long ago so we used to unplug everything as well. I stopped doing that for small things like router and then this happened a few months ago. Almost nothing can protect you against a direct strike. A direct strike has so much voltage and current that electricity can fly through the air across your room from one terminal to another. That's why tall buildings or buildings in lightning prone areas have protection systems installed which try to minimize effects of a direct strike. Effects of an indirect strike can be mitigated by removing appliances from their terminals and that is what we practiced until now. Now, I've kept a separate cable for inverter connection and I just remove the main fuse and switch to inverter supply for the duration of the thunderstorm.

In any new installation I am using cascaded levels of surge protection as well. There is one Type 1+2 installed in the main panel. The job of that is to divert the current to earth in case of a surge. Then you install Type 3 surge protectors at your power terminals. Usually, these are sacrificial in nature and use various types of technologies like MOVs and enclosed fuses.
 
This brings back memories of the antenna days. If it rains or is about to rain, the first thing to go is the STB signal (Airtel/Tatasky) so we end up turning the TV off. I lost a wifi router/modem to a thunderstorm a decade or so back. The Netgear router was fried after a lightning strike. It's not much of an issue these days
 
I have had a history of my local cable internet providers switch/router whatever devices they used around 15+ years ago.
Many times malfunction and were damaged due to lightning/rains.
 
A lightning strike has a similar effect as a stone thrown in a lake with still water. The ripples will travel quiet a long distance. Similarly when lightning hits, the potential (crudely called as voltage) of area rises. The biggest rise will be at the spot of hit and as you go farther, potential decreases. Appliance expect a zero potential on their grounding pin (zero voltage) but when lightning strikes nearby, this potential rises. Current always flows from high potential to low potential and so appliances can get electrocuted for a fraction of a second. Their survival depends on how well they are engineered and how far they are from the strike.
 
90% of my isp's switches were fried during a lightning strike,the current travelled through interconnected wires,my router was fried too luckily i had a usb nic for wan so easy to replace.
 
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