Do You Unplug Equipment During Thunderstorms?

That particular storm snuck up on meor just popped up out of nowhere, and I had just gotten out of the shower, as I was listening to music.

That one strike took out two of my amps that I had just had revamped a week or two earlier. Grrrr.

Exactly the reason for surge protection. If I knew when a surge was going to hit I'd unplug ahead of time.  It's the one's I'm not expecting that I worry about.

@mylogic thats when you sue the equipment maker and end up owning your own tube amp company 😂

Yes, disconnect if you know its coming.  3 million volts is hard to stop but most damaging surges are a lot lower.  We have some sort of powerr event 2-3 times a month that are not 3 million volts.

@taoist just reminded me. Used to live near Boston and used DirecTV. Lost a couple of DirecTV receivers, but it wasn’t actually to lightning. It was to wind storms. The wind would cross the surface of the antenna depositing an electron charge. It would eventually build up and ZAP!!  Probably no more of a charge than you get on a dry night when you walk across the carpet and touch something or some one that's grounded.

No lightning, no power surge needed. The solution was installing a coax surge protector. BTW, it was grounded externally. That was not why.

A little off topic, but here’s a fun site if you like to look at the end results of electricity doing bad things.

https://www.electrical-forensics.com/SurgeSuppressors/SurgeSuppressors.html

It may help to preface this by saying I live in South Carolina near the ocean and we have severe storms roll through here yearly.   For this and other reasons I'm paranoid about lightning protection. 

Yes, I turn off my power conditioners and sometimes even my breakers but only when I know well in advance what will happen.  The problem is that about 2/3rds of the power issues this house goes through are not even lightning related.   When it is, sometimes I see my lights flash several seconds before I hear the thunder.  It's already too late.  Sometimes I'm away from home when lightning rolls through.

My point is, yes, I do turn things off (not actually unplugged) but I also rely on state of the art surge protection.  I wrote about my thinking at length here and here.