Industrial NetMedia offers some tips to save your computer from a lightning strike.

This summer promises to be a season of thunder storms and power outages. Seasonal instability can cause your power to flicker on and off rapidly, brown out with low voltage moments or go out completely for minutes to hours. When you are in the middle of writing that Instagram post or catching up on the NEWS at the local Facebook Rant and Rave Group, interruptions can be annoying. If you are in the middle of that Disney+ movie, you might go crazy, having to strike up a conversation with your kids or spouse.

These outages are more than annoying. They can cause permanent damage to your computers, modems, routers and other equipment. The damage can range from fried power supplies, motherboards to hard-drives. The hard-drive is the biggest fear because it contains all of your memories, documents and photos. A power bump can cause the hard-drive to fail writing at a critical moment and render your hard-drive dead. A data recovery specialist starts at about $1000 but if you are using a new SSD, it may not be recoverable at all. I hope you have a backup. Other failures mean replacing parts and reinstalling software or paying your geeky friend to fix it. The bottom line is that you would be without your computer for awhile. Your phone data plan better be a good one.

Simple Solution: Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS)

Put your model/router/computer on a battery backup UPS. No more outages. A small UPS is about $70 to $100 for 15 minutes power, $170 and up for about an hour or more. Not only will a UPS stop outages, it will protect your hardware from power bumps, brownouts or quick flickering on-offs, which can destroy your computers.

I'm speaking from experience with a few lost hard-drives. Trust me, I back up my files often... now.

What Else can I Protect?

You can protect almost anything with almost any size battery and some scale up by adding extra battery capacity. Be prepared for big dollars for these. You may have heard about the Tesla Power Wall for whole home solutions starting at about $10,000 in Canada or $3,000 in the USA. (How is that fair?)

Surge Protectors

You may be asking yourself... "but I already have a power bar with a surge protector." Great, but this does not provide power when there isn't any. The UPS is the way to go.

Another good idea is to put your whole home on a surge protector built into the power panel. Everything contains electronics these days including your fridge, stove and that new Alexa or Google device that is always listening.