With summer in Florida comes the daily afternoon thunderstorm. Most of the time it is only a slight inconvenience to outdoor activities since it clears up after an hour or so. But, it can become much more frustrating when you find out your home has sustained electrical damage. While serious incidents like homes burning down are rare, electronics like TVs, game systems, lighting, and audio systems are frequently fried by electrical surges from lightning.

Electrical Surges

Lightning hitting your home will destroy its electrical system and anything plugged into outlets. There could also be a potential risk of fire, as well. While a direct strike is relatively uncommon, most of the time when electronics in your home are damaged, it is because of an electrical surge. These occur when lighting strikes either the ground near power lines or the lines themselves that are connected to your house. The lightning sends a huge flow of energy up through these lines, terminating the circuits inside electronic devices or in your home’s electrical panel. Surge protectors on outlets and circuit breakers are in place to protect electronics from an unsafe energy flow, but they can be overpowered by the immense amount of energy that lightning strikes transmit. The aftermath can be severe: melted or fused-together wires which are now useless and destroyed electronic devices. In many cases, it is too costly to try to fix the damaged components and you will instead have to replace the destroyed items.

Protecting Your Home and Property

To prevent lightning from damaging electronics inside your home, you could get a lightning rod professionally installed to ground all the energy before reaching your electrical panel. Otherwise, you should have a quality surge protector on your electrical panel so it can prevent the surge from reaching wires running to your outlets. Lastly, you can install surge protectors on phone lines, TV Cables, and ethernet cables to prevent your phones, TV, computer, modem, and router from being fried by lightning.

Electrical System Experts

Are your home’s electrical system or electronic components at risk of being destroyed by a lightning strike? The professionals at AVI can help you keep your electronics safe. We specialize in the installation of audio-visual systems of all kinds for homes and businesses, from home theaters to security cameras. No job is too big or small for us. To learn more about or services, please give us a call at 321-228-5053.