HPR4762: Surviving the Strike: A Host’s Tale of Lightning

This show has been flagged as Explicit by the host. In this intense and personal episode, the host recounts the terrifying experience of his home being struck by lightning twice—once in an apartment two decades ago and recently in his current house. He details the catastrophic damage inflicted on his electronics, explaining how the surge traveled through coaxial cables, Ethernet lines, and USB ports, destroying network cards, a motherboard, a gaming mouse, a garage door opener, a dishwasher disposal, and even an electric scooter. The narrative takes a harrowing turn as he describes climbing a ladder during an active storm to tarp holes in the roof, only to have lightning strike 50 feet away, causing drywall to explode and leaving him with a near-fatal shock. The host seeks practical advice from listeners on how to properly protect Ethernet connections and electronics during storms, questioning the efficacy of standard surge protectors versus industrial-grade solutions, while warning others against the dangers of handling equipment or going outside during severe weather. Provide feedback on this episode .

November 3, 2026Duration unavailable

In brief

Episode summary

Operator shares their personal experiences with lightning strikes, detailing the destruction of household electronics across two separate incidents spanning several years. The host discusses the limitations of surge protectors and seeks advice on industrial-grade ethernet protection after sustaining significant property damage.

Read the episode

Adapted from “HPR4762: Surviving the Strike: A Host’s Tale of Lightning” by Hacker Public Radio, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

This transcript was generated by speech recognition and the summary and chapters by AI, so they can contain errors. BestPodcast is not affiliated with the creator. These adaptations are available under the same license.

This is Hacker Republic Radio episode 4762 for Tuesday the 3rd of November 2026. Today's show is entitled Surviving the Strike: A Host's Tale of Lightning. It is the 150th show of Operator and is about 12 minutes long. It carries an explicit flag. The summary is Surviving the Strike: A Host's Tale of Lightning, exploded electronics and near-death experiences.

Hello and welcome to another episode of Hacker Republic Radio with host Operator. Um hopefully I won't be too noisy. I'm almost done doing dishes here. So anyways, uh I wanted to talk about um well let me talk about lightning and electronics. Um cuz our house got struck by lightning. Um and I uh apartment got struck by lightning several years ago and had similar experience. So if you haven't had the opportunity to have lightning strike your house or wherever you wherever you live, um you know, it's kind of hit or miss.

You never really know what's going to happen. Uh the first time in the apartment it happened, I think it came in through the uh coax, something like that. And then jumped from the cable modem to the ethernet and then from the ethernet it blew like three network cards. Um and I think possibly the switch or router or something like that. Um I can't remember. So I mean it's probably $100 or $250 you know $100 worth of damage. Uh rep- replacing network cards. I didn't have to replace any boards or anything.

Um they're probably designed to maybe get shocked like that. I have no idea how it works. I haven't even asked the AI about it. But the idea is you know you can get the batteries, you can get the battery backups. You can also get a coax um you know uh uh surge power strip with the coax thing and it's supposed to help protect against that. I don't think that matters when you actually get struck by lightning. I think it's more for like brownouts and stuff or uh uh not brownouts but uh whatever the other one is.

Brownouts and the when there's power surges. I think it would protect from like a power surge but obviously not lightning cuz nothing protects lightning in literally. So that first time in the apartment it it shocked my wife. She was on the she was on the computer and it shocked her finger. Um uh when the mouse and she said she saw an arc from her finger to the mouse uh when she was you know doing whatever.

Um you know I drink this real Coke the Mexican Coke. I drink the whole thing and then I ran down the stairs. It's like tachycardia man. This stuff is uh 39 carbs 39 grams of sugar. I mean Jesus. Crickey. I can barely drink the whole I can never drink the whole thing. Um so the 16 oz or something. So anyways, um that was the first time. This time I was upstairs unplugging the gaming machine and I'd unplugged the power from the gaming machine not the ethernet and that's what I'm going to try to figure out and maybe you guys can help me out.

Um I unplugged the power the battery I shut everything down and then unplugged the battery um and I think that's it. Everything is everything is plugged into the battery. You're not supposed to plug power strips into a battery. Um mainly because I think you people don't know what they're doing and they daisy chain a bunch together and then the power turns on. Power turns off, the battery goes to switch on and there's not enough power to drive it and it just shuts off. So I've seen that happen before where um battery trips over and you get like a you know 65 in TV and a Walmart battery backup and it just goes kaput like it won't it doesn't have enough amps to to power uh to power it.

So um with that said as I was going downstairs um I think what happened is as I was actually unplugging stuff I hadn't unplugged the receiver yet which is on a I want to call it like a controlled uh power strip and they're very cool. Um if it's not great for the electronics but you turn off there's a control plug and so the idea is when that uh is on essentially. So if you set it up maybe a toaster right? You set up a toaster and you turn on the toaster and everything the rest of the slaves on that power strip will turn on.

Um so the idea is that when I turn on the receiver the TV and the sub and something else turns on. So that way I don't have like that vampire power of everything being you know on all the time. The receiver is kind sort of in slave mode I can talk to it over the ethernet even though it's off which is kind of terrifying. It's the loudest thing on the on the inter- on the LAN actually. Um cuz it has all these stupid protocols that you can't turn off.

Same thing with the TV. The TV's not on the internet but um when I first got it I had to hack into it to to get the to disable the bluetooth cuz it constantly was trying to be connecting to any kind of bluetooth device to show it up anywhere. It would pop up on the screen so like neighbor would do something and they would see bluetooth device pop up on the screen of some neighbor. So I had to go and do some shenanigans to get it in like admin mode it like you know allegedly disables the the uh the the wall to here whatever.

Anyways, um so that's what happened. I think after lightning hit um as I was kind of unplugging things I heard a kaboom um and a pow and kaboom. I didn't know if it was lightning or just the tree falling but I was like I hope it didn't fall on the house and it literally fell on the same side of the one the house that I was on while I was unplugging stuff. So kid goes upstairs and whatever. Uh we got two holes in the house. Um so before the second storm was coming through like an idiot um you know I said what are the odds of lightning striking in the same place twice?

Um our house getting hit by lightning and me getting hit by lightning what are the odds? So I said I'll go up there before the next thing and I'll uh get on the ladder and while in the middle of the storm and uh put tarps uh got the chainsaw out and cut some of the stuff and put uh covered up the holes but before I did that and as I was climbing up on a ladder um on a one-story ladder uh lightning struck about 50 ft away from the corner of our house and like legit exploded like paint off the walls.

Um there was parts where the drywall had been exploded and just stuck to the other side of the wall. So there's like a bullet size hole in the wall and then that sheetrock had just you know hyper expanded and vaporized and exploded that peed chunks so hard that bits of it of the sheetrock like splattered up against the other side of the wall and like stuck on the wall. Um so it was kind of terrifying. Um and there you know it's not like burnt in there.

Um it blew sockets uh the ceiling sockets out like the uh the the can lights or whatever they call them. Uh it blew the sockets out of those. Um we're still assessing damage. My question is how do I protect my ethernet? Is there something I can plug into my ethernet switch before it goes to the ethernet? Um at you know once it hits ethernet what can I do from there um so that this doesn't happen again? Cuz this is the second time we've got struck by lightning and it's taken out stuff through ethernet.

And more importantly you know I know there's thing like the the there's some things you want to leave plugged in cuz there's a ground there and there's some things you don't want to plug in and like what is the what is the guidance um real world guidance to actually protect your electronics during a storm and is there some kind of you know even with a whole house surge protector I've heard people say you know oh I went down my thing and voila around my and then you know caught my fence on fire because you know even though I had a whole house surge protector lightning doesn't give a crap about any of that once it decides to you know use your house as a uh as a as a wire.

Um so anyways you know what can I buy to protect my gear? I'm down um you know a motherboard well the interface of the motherboard everything else hopefully luckily everything else was fine. Um but I'm down a you know interface on the motherboard and a switch and uh our our garage door opener our um dishwasher that's why I'm washing this is by hand here. Uh garbage disposal I got it working for a second and then sparks flew and I said okay there's something horribly wrong with this thing.

Um there's no metal in it or anything it was like shooting sparks from the bottom. I'm not an electrician and when I see sparks and fire I kind of back away. Um so and we got some other equipment uh like I said the receiver and a mouse the mouse blew out somehow um it went through the USB of the motherboard and blew stuff up. Um let's see what else. Um what else did it kill? I'm kind of working on all this here of stuff to to send.

The motherboard, the Onkyo receiver, a mouse um the house of course four holes um the garage door opener probably just the PCB board it turns on and goes click click click. Um there's a ground fault in the house actually. Um I think they swapped the the neutral and the whatever and the at one point in time it was reading 60 volts uh in a light socket and somehow I fixed that because something was wired incorrectly and I still think it's wired incorrectly because it's backwards where they do like the ground is the neutral or the hot and neutral are swapped.

Um so anyways that's a that's a thing and I'm using a 16 port uh PoE and the front camera which is a nice uh uh UniView uh you know kind of legit professional grade camera. Um the dishwasher, garbage disposal and the scooter was plugged in my son's scooter uh exploded uh also I mean it's like a you know 36 volt PCB board that probably traveled through the DC port and uh blew all that stuff up. You know with all these things that are PCBs um the the oven is fine, the microwave is fine.

Um but pretty much you know a dryer is new or the washing machine's new it's got a PCB board on it nothing happened there. Um but there's stuff all over the house that got hit um cuz it got hit kind of on both sides of the house. Um uh so everything kind of got zapped. Um for but for me like what can I do during a storm? And can I unplug? Should I unplug all my stuff? Should I keep it plugged in? What should I keep plugged in?

What can I buy for my ethernet specifically? Cuz I know for like you know the big huge towers they have like I don't know they like reset through some argon gas or something so like you can those can get hit the lightning rods can get hit and they trip or whatever. And then like some kind of stupid expensive chemical process or something. I don't know if they like refill it with freon or something. And like it like resets somehow and then you can like re-trip it um to keep to protect the uh to keep the thing from like you know exploding or whatever.

So anyways I I would imagine there's some kind of industrial grade you know lightning resistant uh ethernet protection that I can buy or maybe a power over ethernet switch I can buy that it's like ironclad no spare no expense you know $1600 switch you know eight port switch. Um I I don't know. I don't know what my options are but you know let me know what your experience is, what your thoughts are and you know you know let me know how I can prevent my shit from you know this doesn't happen often.

Last time it happened was when we were in apartments which was 17 20 years ago. Um you know what are the odds? But apparently the odds of getting struck by lightning after your house getting struck by lightning and uh tree hitting it are non-zero. So do not go um outside in the middle of a thunderstorm and think that uh you will not get struck by lightning because I basically almost died. Um cuz I felt it on the ladder. Um so that was not fun. Anyways, um you know let me know how it goes.

Let me know if you have any questions um and thoughts and uh good luck and stay away from lightning and don't be stupid like me and get on a ladder in the middle of the storm with a chainsaw. Later. You have been listening to the Hacker Public Radio podcast at hackerpublicradio.org. Today's show was contributed by a HBR listener like yourself. If you ever thought of recording a podcast, then visit the HBR site to find out how easy it really is. Hosting for HBR has been kindly provided by an honest host.com, the Internet Archive, rsync.net, and the HBR community content delivery network.

Unless otherwise stated, today's show is released under a Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike 4.0 International License.

Episode summary

Follow the conversation

Read the episode