VPL-VW 60 Lightning Strike - Proving it..... how ,they say plugging in caused it !!

First there is no surge protector that will protect from a direct lightning strike, that's what insurance is for. Surge protectors come from when energy enter the power lines, cable lines, phone lines etc. Your first defense is make sure your home's ground is good, n electrician would check this. Because without a solid ground my next suggestions won't work well. The best protection is a whole house surge protector installed by an electrician at your electrical service panel. You should also have one for the cable line as well where it enters your home. This will protect from most surges coming down the power lines and lightning is a big cause of these types of surges. Surges coming from within the house like when motors turn on and off, etc. can be stopped by a dent surge protector. I would recommend one that doesn't divert the surge energy to ground. Surge X, Zero Surge, Some Furman models are common brands but there are others. Either way it is not something you are going to find at an electronics or hardware store.

There are also HDMI surge protectors and we have seen your problem many times where the damage blows out all the HDMI ports. If you have everything else in place I would consider HDMI surge protection the last level of protection but you can get it in lieu of some of these other devices. I know budget gets crazy with some of this stuff and it is a little over kill. So if I had to do one thing it would be the whole house surge protection for electrical and cable lines but an HDMI protector might be less expensive.

Lastly, sags in power cause more damage than surges and are more frequent so a UPS is a good idea.

Did you tell the repair center that it blew from lightening strike? If so, and they insist on saying it blew because you plugged in the hdmi cable while the projector was on then try to find another repair center and start over, explaining what happened and you need a letter saying it was a lightening strike. If not, I though hdmi was supposed to be hot swappable, meaning you can plug/unplug cables while the equipment is on, at least i theory. http://www.hdmi.org/installers/insidehdmicable.aspx. Maybe you can convince the repair center of this. Can you contact Sony and ask if the pj's hdmi ports are hot swappable? Maybe they can send you some documentation saying so.

Mike-

Thanks for confirming this; my a$$ just tightened thinking of how I have some-how avoided blowing my PJ all the times I have hot-swapped my HDMI cables.

Those hdmi chips are sensitive. Storm blew the port up on my ps3 once. It's very odd as there was no other damage.


I try to unplug when it storms now, habit for a lot of people in tornado alley.