FTTC During Thunderstorms

I just saw the forecasters was all over twitter, facebook, press, itv news, sky news and bbc news of a possible severe thunderstorms in all over UK start from this Sunday onwards lasted until next Thursday because of very high heat, humidity and cape index leads to severe storms.



I know during thunderstorms that all FTTC modem / router should be turned off and pulled out dsl cable from the telephone socket. I saw press newspaper a long while back where a lightning bolt damaged bt socket.



I expecting ISP's will be huge pressure to deal with FTTC customers will complaints of DLM during bad storms next week.



Probably advised best to leave modem off overnight when go to bed and pulled out cable of dsl socket during overnight storms as possible.

Don't forget to remove the aerial from your TVs and unlpug as many items from the mains as you can. Don't hold anything connected directly to the mains or telephone line, just to be careful.

Turning off your electricity at the consumer unit is best, then dig a hole in your lawn and bury yourself in it until the storm passes.

In reply to a post by adslmax:

I know during thunderstorms that all FTTC modem / router should be turned off and pulled out dsl cable from the telephone socket. I saw press newspaper a long while back where a lightning bolt damaged bt socket.

Make sure you protect your home from BT poles falling on it.

When I was little, my mum used to unplug the TV aerial during a thunderstorm and put the connector into a plant pot.

She said it was because it needed to go to earth.

In reply to a post by candlerb:

When I was little, my mum used to unplug the TV aerial during a thunderstorm and put the connector into a plant pot.

She said it was because it needed to go to earth.

It obviously worked [chuckle]

In reply to a post by candlerb:

When I was little, my mum used to unplug the TV aerial during a thunderstorm and put the connector into a plant pot.

She said it was because it needed to go to earth.

ROFL - Brilliant

I don't know if you meant this as a joke or not, but my Nan really did do this. I don't know if was because someone told her it needed to go to earth or not and being little I never thought to ask, I thought she knew what she was doing

In reply to a post by AndyPandy:

Turning off your electricity at the consumer unit is best, then dig a hole in your lawn and bury yourself in it until the storm passes.

but then you are in danger of drowning if said hole floods in the rain

Last year we suffered a direct lightening strike on the telegraph pole outside my house that serves 17 houses. The main multi-pair phone cable (40 pair?) fried and everyone's routers fused as well (there's a fuse link on the router circuit boards). Openreach had to replace about 200 metres of the overhead cable, many splice points along the cable to the exchange had to be cut out and respliced as well. It was a nightmare. It also fried my graphics card for some reason but the rest of my computer was unaffected thankfully. It was turned on at the time, wired Ethernet cable. I guess I was very very lucky.

Openreach spent a good four days up here repairing the lines. I give them their due, they worked long days including the weekend.

Lesson learnt. Next time we have a thunderstorm I'm unplugging everything.

Ali.

Edited by deleted (Sat 22-Jun-19 16:52:15)

Makes me thankful that I have FTTP now. The storm I had here some nights ago was quite loud and it was forked lightning too. At one point the electricity went off for about a minute (I was expecting some hours) but I also have a UPS system for emergency lighting, the phone system, NAS, other networking equipment, and finally emergency torches which come on automatically and last several hours on a single charge. I'm fairly prepared for a long power outage.

The storm I had last year, if I recall correctly when I was still on FTTC, did severely interfere with the connection so I ended up unplugging both routers for the night. The sky was almost constantly lit up for quite a few hours, but oddly very little in the way of sound. That was a strange storm.

Regarding TV/news weather 'alerts', I usually don't go by them a lot. I check on both Dark Sky's website and Google's weather ("OK Google, is it raining tomorrow?" - for example), which generally seem more accurate. Although it's going to be pretty warm next week, I've apparently got no storms for the city I'm in on the south east coast of England.

Edited by Ixel (Sat 22-Jun-19 17:16:49)

In reply to a post by Ixel:

The sky was almost constantly lit up for quite a few hours, but oddly very little in the way of sound. That was a strange storm.

you tend to get that when the lightning is going between cloud layers, rather than to ground.
edit to add:
yes it can be quite spectacular! I watched a storm like this over the north sea,
occasional but repeated strikes to boats (their masts make good targets)
could also see the planes trying to go around the storm too

Edited by ggremlin (Sat 22-Jun-19 19:29:30)

https://www.lightningmaps.org/#x=0.4285;m=oss;r=0;t=...

If you receive a direct hit to your house it won't matter one jot whether you unplugged everything or not. You will be looking at large insurance claim and needing to having your house rewired as you can no longer trust the insulation on the wiring. It can blow the the plaster off the walls where electrical cable leads to switches and sockets too. Take a quick Google for some pictures of what sort of damage a direct strike can do, and this is all assuming your house is not set on fire.

Even a close by strike results in a ground potential that is significantly raised and it is not unknown for say a lightning strike to find ground through an unplugged aerial lead by jumping into the close by TV and through it's mains connection. Might explain people putting the disconnected lead in plant pots.

If your phone and mains come in underground there is little point in unplugging it. Note even if you have overhead phone and you unplug everything and the telephone poles is struck by lightning you are looking at days of outage regardless.

In reply to a post by ggremlin:

In reply to a post by AndyPandy:

Turning off your electricity at the consumer unit is best, then dig a hole in your lawn and bury yourself in it until the storm passes.

but then you are in danger of drowning if said hole floods in the rain

The more advanced version includes a steel air and water pipe with several spikes welded to the top to prevent pigeons sitting on it and blocking the air and water flow.

A couple of years back, a storm took out the adsl filter faceplate, all bar one ethernet port on the router and the ethernet port on a TV. The phone line is underground for the last 1.7 miles, but with a short overhead section before that, and then underground for the last 2 miles. So I do tend to disconnect the incoming phone line if there is a storm nearby.

In reply to a post by jabuzzard:

If you receive a direct hit to your house it won't matter one jot whether you unplugged everything or not.

Thanks for the doom and gloom, however I'll still unplug everything thank you.

I might get run over crossing the road, so you probably think it's a waste of time looking and listening for traffic before crossing?

Ali.

If it were a pure fibre cable then it would be pretty much immune to the potential differences induced by lightning.

Unfortunately, with the hybrid copper/fibre cable normally deployed these days, that benefit is mostly lost.