We had a nasty little electrical storm in our neck of the woods (literally) a couple of nights ago. Power went off for a few hours and all that normal-type nuisance stuff. However, what I did not expect was the damage that happened as a result of a monstrous power surge that ripped through our home. I’m still shelling out $MONEY to try to get back to normal.

I believe what happened was that a surge came through either our phone line or our cable line. And no, I didn’t have any kind of surge protection on the phone or cable lines. Never thought you’d need it, honestly. I do have these lines protected now, though, which is small comfort being that I’ve managed to make it this far in life without said protection unscathed, which means the money I’ve shelled out for the protection likely won’t be needed for another XXX years. But anyway,  however the surge managed to get into my house, it fried my Vonage phone adapter, my cable modem, my Linksys WRT54GS wireless router, my main network switch for the house, all wired ethernet adapters in my computers, all of the phones in our house, and my laptop power adapter (which wasn’t even connected to my laptop, thankfully). Nice, eh?

Cost analysis of recovering from this little electrical hissy fit:

• New Vonage VDV21-VD phone adapter: $80 (with a $70 mail-in rebate, thankfully)
• New Linksys WRT54GL wireless router: $65
• New Rosewill 8-port switch: $15
• New Motorola SB5101 cable modem: $80
• New APC Back-UPS BE650G 8-outlet surge protector, with phone/data and cable surge protection also: $90
• New APC P8VT3 surge protector for new flat-screen TV which I luckily unplugged: $30
• New wired NICs to replace blown-out ones: $75
• New phones for house: $?? Dunno. Not sure if I want to do wireless phones again or just get old, corded, non-electrically-powered phones. But the phones that got fried cost $70, iirc.

All told: $500 or so. Not too bad, I suppose. I’ve certainly heard worse. What’s more frustrating than anything is not having any phone or internet service for a day and therefore knocked out of being able to work. Thankfully, my awesome Cambridge VMware brethren had a replacement power adapter for my work laptop, so that only cost me $40 in gas/parking to drive the 3 hours back/forth to pick it up.

And because I know that you’re all thinking “well yeah, but if you hadn’t been too cheap to buy the $90 surge protector a couple of years ago, none of this would have happened”, I’ll freely admit that you’re absolutely right. =:( Sometimes my cheap nature ends up costing more than it saves. Case in point.