Add getting your house struck by lightning to the list of things I do not recommend.

ShawnG said:

You're probably going to find more damage to the car down the road. 

Any bearing the surge passes through will have a burnt spot in it. It won't show up right away.

FORTUNATELY- this is the single dumbest car on earth, so fixing it is actually very simple. It's only at the shop now because insurance reasons. I have no problems dealing with a wheel bearing on my own. I'm also still hoping to buy a new(er?) car within the next year or so and take some of the pressure off this one, so I think we will be ok. Here's to hoping. 

old and busted (the cat too, really- he is my oldest and...most busted)new hotness. 

My head of pharmacy just had his house get struck and it's neem nearly a complete loss; His electric car has to get pulled apart at the dealer to see if it's salvageable, his home solar system is completely destroyed, and so are most electronics in his house. Hundreds of thousands in damages.

And.... done. Other than Duke moving at the speed of smell, everyone else is finished. We got the check from from renters yesterday, the TVs were already bought and paid for. They underpaid me on the TVs (ACV is a motherberkeleyer) but they OVERPAID me on the Xbox (those are $600? ok. I won't argue) so it all sort of balanced out. Just got the call from the worlds dumbest service writer and my guess was right, the ECU was cooked, and the new one is in the car and the car is fixed. we can go get it whenever. Insurance won't factor into that fix due to deductible, so it's a wash- but it's fixed. We're just waiting on auxillary coverage from Duke to kick in and cover my deductibles and my ACV losses and my initial evals (yeah, the TV's berkeleyin' broke. Dummies.) and we're good to go. 

And now we unplug E36 M3 when it gets wild. 

Had a lightning strike a few years ago take out a Frontier internet box outside and my modem/router. The crazy thing during that strike was I felt a tiny tingle from my earphone as I was working from home that day. Somehow my laptop that had the earphones plugged in came out unscathed and I am still using it without any issues.

Same strike took out a ceiling fan too. Took forever for Frontier come in and replace the unit.

In reply to aw614 :

funny you say that, my GF was on her work laptop at the time of the incident and she reported a similar feeling, and her unit survived. The mouse would have fixed that E36 M3 ASAP. 

Mndsm said:

And.... done. Other than Duke moving at the speed of smell, everyone else is finished.

Hey, now.  Steady on.

In the old days, farmstead homes all had multiple lightning rods attached to the roofs. The house was also the tallest thing standing on the prairie and I wonder if they really helped or not. I have just now bought a new grounding rod and 6 gauge stranded copper ground wire and the two clamps to connect everything to my TV antenna. Will it really help/work or only attract the lighting to all of my stuff for it to destroy?

In reply to VolvoHeretic :

Lightning rods will definitely help on a house that's the tallest thing around.

Good grounding around the antenna and equipment alone won't protect anything, but a well-grounded lightning arrestor could, like these:

https://www.dxengineering.com/search/part-type/coaxial-lightning-protectors

Be sure to buy one with a compatible frequency range. It looks like modern digital TV runs from about 50-810Mhz.