this post was submitted on 14 Jul 2026
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So this one time my house got struck by lightning. It caused over 10k in damages including some of the equipment in my homelab.
The lightning traveled through the coax on the modem (some how unaffected), into my opnsense, destroyed the pcie NIC, on both WAN and LAN side, managed to travel through my POE switch and killed every non-POE device, including my main workstations motherboard. The switch was still alive but POE function wasn't working. After I replaced it, strangely none of the POE devices were affected and were working fine.
Since then, my coax has ground protections, two of them.
Pic of the ethernet cable that was connected from the modem to opnsense wan port
Similar thing happen to me. Had a lightning strike fry the ONT port outside, the charge went through to the UPS cat5e surge protector and to my opnsense box and fried it. Luckily it stopped there.
This is where I tell everyone to never buy UPSs from CyberPower. I sent them the thing to inspect because it was guaranteed paying for the damages from power surges and they claimed there was nothing wrong with it and their inspection came clean. But they sent me a new one and said they won't pay for my lost firewall.
Sorry to hear you got 10k in damages, that sucks. I've now got a whole house surge protector to try my best to avoid that (and I STILL unplug expensive things like my TV and stereo system).
I feel like big ass lightning rods exist for exactly this. Just a lot of metal to take that shit away from your house and straight to the ground.
as if we needed any more reasons to demand fibre
PoE devices are built to tolerate high voltages. Certainly not lightning-level, but you gotta figure that's not what really ran rampant through your network. Just enough of a momentary spike to fry stuff that doesn't have safeties.