Surge protection for your router, CCTV and inverter during the short rains

November is short rains season across much of Kenya, and the storms that come with it tend to arrive in the late afternoon and evening, exactly when homes and offices have everything switched on. The rain itself is rarely the problem for electronics. The problem is what lightning and an unstable grid do to the power and data cables running into your building.

How storms damage equipment

Lightning does not have to strike your roof to cause damage. A strike nearby induces a surge on long cables: the power line, the outdoor camera cables, a copper network run between two buildings. The surge travels along the cable and into whatever sits at the end of it. Just as common is the surge when grid power returns after an outage, when several appliances restart at once and the voltage swings before it settles.

The equipment that suffers most is the equipment that is always on and always connected: the WiFi router, the network switch, the CCTV recorder, the inverter and the gate motor.

Precautions worth taking this week

• Put the router, the CCTV recorder and the network switch on a surge protector or, better, a small UPS with surge protection built in
• Check that the building has a working earth connection; surge protection depends on having somewhere safe to send the surge
• Fit surge protection on outdoor camera runs and on any copper network cable that leaves the building
• Unplug sensitive equipment you do not need when a storm is overhead, especially televisions and desktop computers
• After an outage, wait a minute before switching heavy appliances back on

Why fibre helps

A fibre internet connection carries light through glass, not electricity through copper, so the line into your building cannot carry a lightning surge to your router the way a long copper cable can. The router still needs power, so it still needs protection on the power side, but one path for damage is closed.

Backup power and storms

An inverter or UPS protects what is plugged into it only if it is itself protected and correctly earthed. If your backup system was installed without surge protection on the input, it is worth having it looked at before the heaviest weeks of the season, not after the first failure.

Wave Fiber Technologies installs fibre internet, CCTV and backup power, and we design surge protection and earthing into each of them. If you would like your setup checked before the storms peak, call or WhatsApp us on +254 790 293985.

Photograph: Tony Webster from Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.