Pink Poogle Toy Forum

Doesnt america have fuses? Or circuit breakers?

Heh...don't worry about the Game Cube. I've heard them described as the black boxes of the video game industry. Nintendo sure makes durable products.


Most people do. They (circuit breakers) are installed in my home, which means whatever killed the cable modem and DVD player must've travelled through whatever carries the TV and internet signals.

Circuit breakers would not have protected any of the equipment damaged here - they aren't designed to protect from lightning strikes, they don't trip anywhere near fast enough (as for fuses - forget it!), and a direct lightning strike on an electrical power system would 'jump' any open circuit breakers anyway.

As DiscordantNote pointed out, damage to DVDs/TVs/modems is caused by ligtning's electrical charge entering at the TV aerial or telephone line. A direct hit is not even necessary - the TV aerial will pick up a 'charge' even from a close lightning strike which is sufficiently large to trash the sensetive components in the 'front end' of connected equipment. In this instance circuit breakers would not trip out. RCDs/Ground Fault Interrupters may trip out (and possibly get broken) as they're much more sensitive, but it would not have saved any of the equipment.

Interestingly, older tellies (before they were jammed full of microprocessors) would usually survive a close lightning strike, but often ended up with a black-and-white picture (the colour generating circuit was particularly vulnerable to the static).

I had lightning hit my house many years ago. Went through the electrical line and melted the plug on the electric mixer--which was plugged into the wall and constantly charging its batteries.

Since then, I have since learned that you need surger protectors for all electrical equipment. They aren't expensive and very helpful if you don't want your computer turning to toast.

Our school got struck by lightning, and a bunch of VCRs got fried.

I don't think any appliances have asploded from lightning for me, but someone ran their car into this box that we have near the corner, and that caused a surge in the cable, frying our modem and smurfing up the TV. I'd guess that if we would have had any televisions on, they would've asploded or something. We had to wait like...a week...without internet....or television....*shudders*

But then they fixed it and rented a modem to us and now the world is all better.

Our cable gets messed up sometimes when there's a bad storm. We'll have to do this unplugging replugging thing to hopefully get it back up.

Oh I forgot, because it happened before I was born.
Once lightning struck our barn, knocked a board off the wall, went in and lit some hay on fire.

The cable modem should be free. I lost one thanks to a storm, but I've lost 2 routers now. Maybe this one won't turn on my computer when my dad turns his on. XD

Cable is easier to put back together than DSL. You have to go through India if you use Earthlink. n_n