[stevehull]

Doug,

I strongly suggest checking your grounding system.

In any "electrical" storm, there are always going to be transient imbalances, sometimes in many thousands of volts, on the lines. Normally, a good ground rapidly (in micro to nano seconds) shunts these away to earth.

Get a mho meter - the inverse of an ohm meter. Check the conductivity of your ground system. Especially check the connection between your main circuit panel and real ground. You want millions of mhos (lots of conductivity). The units are Siemens/meter (or mhos). An ohm meter cannot measure this.

A single ground rod meets "code" - connected with solid core AWG 4 copper; the minimum. I always place 2 or even 3 ground rods a few feet apart and feet them with a continuous length of AWG 4 braided copper. The braid is FAR better at conducting very short transients (high frequency) that tend to use the surface effect as a conductor. The braid has a huge surface area compared to the equivalent size AWG single conductor.

Truth be known, I have used the copper braid from old RG-8 coax as a good grounding cable and it works very well. Strip off the outer insulation, pull out the inner foam insulator and conductor and you have a great tube of braided copper. It also solders very well (another way to get a higher mho value).

I spent a lot of time as a biomedical engineer in hospitals tracking down exactly these things (blown equipment, etc). Almost always bad grounds.

Only after that do I put in sacrificial MOSFETS (that is what "surge" protectors are).

Sometimes the ground wire "looks" good to the eye - but the mho meter doesn't lie . . . .

Let us know what you find.




Steve