Last week I wrote about the lightning bolt that cut off the top half of one of our 40′ maple trees. According to the American Meteorological Society (AMS), lightning kills more people per year (on average) than hurricanes and tornadoes combined.
After seeing the effects of an electrical storm first hand with my own eyes, in my own backyard, I have a deeper respect for the power of electrical storms.
Imagine an electrical storm hits your house and fries all of your computer equipment, including the external hard drive you use to back everything up. (You do have a backup solution, don’t you?) How would that affect your productivity? Not good.
Luckily it’s never happened to me, but I know people it has happened to. “An ounce of prevention…”
My intention here isn’t to scare you about electrical storms. My intention is to help you to be more prepared and productive in protecting your electrical equipment from destruction that can be caused by electrical storms.
If you’ve ever had a hard drive crash and lost all of your data, you really appreciate a backup solution that works. I’m offering you a simple and effective option that could prevent such a disaster caused by a lightning strike.
When I would hear an electrical storm coming or see one coming on www.weather.com, I would turn everything off and then go around and unplug everything I didn’t want destroyed.
I don’t care what the AC power strip promises on the packaging. If a lightning strike can cut a tree in half, it could fry an AC strip and possibly ‘jump through’ the strip on/off switch and fry my stuff. I’d rather not take the chance, especially since we can be warned ahead of time.
In fact, you can get severe weather warnings sent to you via email or text messages. Be sure and ‘Edit Settings’ to only receive ‘Severe Only’ instead of the default ‘Moderate Severity and Above’ so you’re only interrupted when it’s severe.
I know I teach that you have to become ruthless about preventing interruptions, but this is an exception that could save you from a catastrophic loss of productivity.
Instead of going around and unplugging everything one at a time or an AC power strip here and an AC power strip there, I thought I’d practice what I preach.
“How could I make the process, of protecting my electronic gear in an electrical storm, better?” Better questions give you better answers.
The answer I got was to have everything related to my computer in my office, i.e., laptops, external hard drives, printer, digital AV interface, iPhone charger, etc., ultimately plugged into ONE heavy duty (thick) power cord that’s easily accessible.
Then I could simply unplug the ONE cord and everything would be unplugged and totally and absolutely protected. (I trust ‘unplugged’ infinitely more than the little on/off switch on the side of AC power strips.)
I obviously wouldn’t recommend this for electrical equipment that draws a lot of juice. Computer related equipment, for the most part, doesn’t. But to appease the attorneys: please check with a qualified electrician before attempting this.