bad week for electronics

[darkoshi]

Sunday evening I pulled out my old Sanyo clock radio/cassette player (model M1950F - like the one in this video except for my AM/FM switch being on the side instead of on the back). The LCD clock display was blank. The button battery had gone bad, leaked, and corroded the battery terminal. I hope to clean it up and get it working again. It - how does one say? - holds memories.

Monday evening after getting home, I found that the cable modem was dead. A couple months ago, while researching my slow internet speed, I had disconnected the coax cable from the UPS and connected the modem directly to the wall-plug. That didn't make a difference, but the speed issues eventually went away, and I forgot about the cable. There was a storm Monday, and a lightning strike must have caused a surge through the coax. All the power cords were plugged into the UPS, and the UPS was even turned off, so the surge couldn't have come in that way.

Luckily, I had already bought a replacement modem when I was having the other issues. So I hooked it up, and called my ISP to activate it. But its internet connection didn't work. Later I found out there was an outage in the area, likely from the same lightning strike.

Tuesday evening, I tried the modem again. The outage had been fixed, and the modem worked, including the internet. But when I hooked it up to the router, the router's internet didn't work. The router must have been damaged too, even though it was still partially working.

Wednesday, Qiao bought a new router and hooked it up. Then we discovered that the printer wouldn't even turn on. It had been connected by an ethernet cable to the router.

So the surge must have come in through the coax into the modem, out through the ethernet cable from the modem to the router, out through the ethernet cable from the router to the printer, and damaged all 3 of them.

Moral of the story: Always keep *all* the cables protected, not only the power cords.

Also this week, my work laptop's battery, which had been "nearing the end of its usable life", finally reached the end.

Comments

[davesmusictank.livejournal.com]

That was a bummer..Make sure you have good ant-surge protection next time.

[darkoshi]

Sure will. I was just reading that the UPS I have may not even be a great surge protector, so I may need to get something else.

[randomdreams.livejournal.com]

Back at the dawn of the internet, in the mid-80's, I used to make high speed isolated data connections for modems. Of course, high speed meant 19.200 baud. But they protected a lot of people from exactly this kind of shenanigans. It's unusual (in my experience) for coax to transmit this into a house, but almost ubiquitous for dsl/phone.