Tampa lightning storms and resulting chaos

 We had a very "impressive" storm the other day.  The lightning was incredible - never had that much up north and this was the first time in about 6 years since we've been in this area that it was actually a little frightening at times.

The wife and I were out to try and get some dinner and go by Lowes again (they might wonder if I sleep in the store somewhere at times).  We waited for some time before finally going into my Wifes favorite "fast food" place - still got wet but lightening had slowed at that point.

When we got home, our daughter said it had been really bad there as well - shook the house a couple times. 

We had noticed that the garage door opener didn't work when we got home but figured it was just the batteries in the remote.  It wasn't the batteries in the remote. The internet wasn't reachable either.

The electrical circuit that the garage door opener is on also has the Internet provider Fios equipment plugged into it.  One of those impressive lightning strikes ended up coming into the house through the electric panel. I do have a whole house surge suppressor installed but it isn't the closest set of breakers to the wires coming in from outside. This apparently enabled the surge to enter the circuit with the garage door opener and Fios equipment - that would be the shortest electrical path other than the whole house surge suppressor.  

There was an outlet extender on the outlet that the Fios was plugged into - that outlet was fried and the garage door opener was fried.

The surge then went from the Fios box over the coax that leads to our WiFi / router.  That was permanently stuck with a "red glowing eye" instead of the normal indicator light.  No hard reset, etc was changing that.  

At this point, I didn't really know whether the Fios equipment in the garage was fried.  I was assuming so but without a new WiFi / router that I could use I couldn't really tell.

I contacted the internet provider to try and confirm what was burned up and they couldn't see our WiFi / router and eventually assumed it was dead.  It wasn't clear to them whether the other equipment would function correctly yet.  They indicated that I should be able to hoop up any similar WiFi / router to get by with while waiting for a replacement - expected in a few days.This was a moment of "arghhh.." because I've been working from home and my job is pretty much only doable with an internet connection. 

I went out the next morning quick and picked up a low/mid-range similar router and got it home. Hooked up and then waited for the "green light"... which didn't happen.  I really thought the Fios equipment was toasted at this point.  I contacted the provider again to see if I could confirm that since I didn't want to be offline for even more days due to waiting on a service appointment.  This is where things seemed to get worse - the provider could not confirm that their equipment was blown and because I wasn't using their provider router they couldn't do anything to help diagnose further.  

My next day of work was interesting and I was tethered to my phone - using it for internet connectivity.  That was unexpectedly OK other than the point where my entire family received emails that my phone # has preparing to go over limits.  My kids found some glee in pointing that out over dinner.

Saturday morning, my wife and I ran over to the wireless store and I ended up upgrading my phone and upping my wireless plan a bit.  The funny thing at this point is that the wireless store didn't thing we should be getting any message regarding exceeding data limits based on our plan.  Anyways, not knowing how long things would be down I would rather be safe than sorry.

The new router showed up that weekend and it turned out that the Fios equipment was not burned out.  After quite a bit of thinking and researching, I think the problem I had with the 3rd party WiFi / router was simply that I didn't have ports forwarded, etc like the router from the provider has when you receive it.  I've not tested that theory yet but will attempt to set it up and get it working as a backup if I get zapped again.

I also invested in some additional surge suppression equipment.

• Another UPS with coax support
• An inline coax surge suppressor
• Some inline Ethernet surge suppressors

Did I mention that after the surge took out our WiFi / router, it also took out 2 network switches - one at each end of the house.   Apparently, it followed the coax and continued on over the Ethernet cable.  Most of the family is using WiFi which may have saved some equipment.  I tend to prefer a wired connection for reliability and consistent speed so I guess some things were self-inflicted on my part.

Here is burned out garage door opener.  We had a new garage door installed just a few weeks before this - glad we didn't get a new garage door opener at the same time. I added a socket extender with some surge support after this was already burned out - just so I wouldn't forget it later.

Below, I am unboxing the new garage door opener once it arrived.  I ordered a couple extra remotes as well since it doesn't seem compatible with our old system.  This system is produced in Germany - just like our Bosch dishwasher.. hm, we waited nearly a year for that and got this in about a week - so glad we didn't end up in the same mess!!

Oh, did I mention that I was waiting to get this up and running before ordering a couple more wireless remotes and a keypad?  Guess what - the wireless remotes are now on back-order... from Germany..  Sigh..  

Here is the new garage door opener in use.  I like this one - it is very quiet.

Here is the network surge suppression equipment I picked up.

Below is the inline coax surge suppressor I wired up. It isn't wired very nicely yet but I didn't want to have it happen again before I had some protection in place.  I have the ground wire hooked to one of the screws for the electrical panel cover for now.

Here is the new UPS with coax support all hooked up.  Yes, it may be overkill having an inline coax suppressor and coax support in the UPS but as long as it doesn't degrade the connection speed, I'll hope it makes an additional positive difference.

I do want to note that there is a differences between "surge suppressor" and "lightning protection" but I'm not going to split hairs on the subject here.  In the end, I wanted a variety of protection which I hope will cover the most common situations that result in damage to electrical devices in the home.

Hope your day is blessed and free of lightning damage, etc.

Scott

Wood working - cutting board shelves

I bought a couple small accessories for my router (Muscle Chuck and 1/4" collet) because I have a number of home projects I want to do.  My first project is a small storage shelf addition that I want to mount under the top cabinets in our kitchen which would hold cutting boards, cooling racks and even the cookie sheets look like they will fit.  This was intended partly as a Mothers Day gift to my wonderful wife but my time got split into to many things to complete it for mothers day. 

This won't be a fancy item; it is about 5" tall with a bottom and one middle shelf.  This is intended for under a diagonal corner cabinet and will be 17" across the front and 17" deep at the sides.  I am using 1/2" oak plywood with 1/4" plywood for the bottom/shelves.  I decided to create dado grooves in the 2 sides for the bottom and middle shelf to attach to the sides with the use of some wood glue.  I am looking into nailing as well but with the thin wood makes me leery of both hand nailing without pre-drilling and use of my 16 gauge air nailer seems like a bad idea as well.  I've got some time to make my final decision on that yet.

I decided to route the grooves in the 1/2" plywood and this gave me a perfect opportunity to try out my new Muscle Chuck and 1/4" collet.  I removed the fixed base and pulled off the existing collet from my porter Cable 690 and popped the Muscle Chuck in without issue.  I did find that the allen bolt didn't seem to clear the base when I went to put it back on; not really a problem.

The 1/4" collet slips into the chuck easily but has enough friction to not just fall out.  I then put in a 1/4" straight plunge bit for making my grooves.  It took me a while to get my depth right; I have not used my router much and it is like learning all over some days.  I finally got it right but ended up setting it again after it appeared that the bit had slipped vertically in the collet and was pushed up higher than desired.  I ended up tightening it a bit more than I thought I would need.  I remember a few blogs indicating problems with slippage in the 1/4" collet (not sure if it was the Muscle Chuck or something else off the top of my head).  I don't think that a bit with a normal 1/2" shaft bit would have a problem.  I did line up the slit in the collet with the slit in the Muscle Chuck as indicated in some instructions so it was setup correctly.

Under power I had no problems, there was no apparent vibration and no slippage as I was working on the work piece.  I would recommend the Muscle Chuck if you tend to mash knuckles changing bits.

I am intending to build a router table in preparation for a number of other wood working projects and am hoping that the Muscle Chuck will reduce the pain involved with those projects.

Here is the in-progress shelf for the cutting boards, cookie sheets and such.  I'll be edging the front with some thin solid Oak trim.

Here is the Muscle Chuck installed and the 1/4" collet. 

Another view of the installed Muscle Chuck.

Here is the nearly completed result.  It was somewhat difficult matching the stain to the existing cabinets.  I ended up mixing 3 stains to get it close and am using a satin polyurethane finish.

I was a bit bummed that I ended up with some polyurethane runs in a couple places; I took a stab at correcting that (scratch out some of it, light sand papering, restain a touch and add another poly coat).  I was using some older brushes which were somewhat nice except I would lose a bristle in the finish every so often.  A bit tiresome, I think I will start with fresh brushes next time.

Here is the location prior to installing the shelves.

[2014/06/07\ And here is how it looks after installing it .  

Not bad overall.  I'm a bit of a perfectionist so I wish some aspects would have turned out better though.  I think my wife really likes it even with a few warts though so it was certainly worth the effort. 

Lessons learned:

• I should have planned more of the final assembly/install in the very beginning.  
• Dealing with the vertical air gap between the wall of the new shelves and the bottom of the existing cabinet turned out to be more of a headache than I expected.  Need to put more thought into that.  The 1/2" wood did not make it easy to get screws into the walls without some slight bulging of the wall.  I did pre-drill holes but would likely have to go to smaller diameter screws as well.  I didn't show it in a picture but I took some scrap flooring pieces and cut them down in height and thickness for use in filling the nearly hidden side gaps  between the new shelves and cabinet.  I put the finished side of the flooring out so it blended better.  This was a workable idea but getting screws in from inside the main cabinet and hitting the center of the 1/2" filler was where things didn't go so well.
• I should have done some of the stain/finish before final assembly.  I had to use a small roller and paint brush taped to a stir stick to get the inner shelf.  It worked but not as well as desired.
• Use quality brushes which are not shedding.
• I should consider whether a small finish/HVLP type sprayer could have produced a slightly better finish.  Of course, without a good dust/breeze free location to work on it; it may not make much difference.
• A pin nailer may have been a little better for tacking the face pieces on with less chance of splitting and smaller holes to fill.  
• I should have checked with my Dad for some tips.  He has lots more experience and is always full of good ideas - a slight same I had to learn some things the hard way.

Hope you enjoyed this adventure and may God bless your day!
Scott