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I think my house was hit by lightning!
This actually happened a few weeks ago, the night before my cat died. For obvious reasons, I post about it right away.
We had a lot of heavy rain and storms during the month of April, and we ended up breaking the record for the wettest April. Around 4:00 a.m. on the night in question, my son was sleeping in the family room like he usually does. He heard a loud crash of thunder (somehow it didn't wake me or my wife up), and then he heard every phone in the house ring briefly. Then the picture on the TV got all messed up for a few seconds (he had fallen asleep with it on again.)
The went back to normal on its own, but none of the phones were working. We figured it was an outage, but we later found out that none of the neighbors' phones were out. My son, who knows a little bit about wiring (OK, a lot more than I do), decided to take a look at the phone box on the house. He told me that when he opened it up, all the wires had been knocked loose. He's guessing that lightning hit the house and the force knocked all the phone wires out of their connectors.
Luckily, the only thing that was damaged was one of the phones -- of course, it had to be the one and only cordless. But at least the TVs, computers, and any pricey electronics were OK. I have them all on surge protectors. None of the simple electrical appliances -- lamps, microwave, etc. seemed to be damaged either.
Pretty scary.
We had a lot of heavy rain and storms during the month of April, and we ended up breaking the record for the wettest April. Around 4:00 a.m. on the night in question, my son was sleeping in the family room like he usually does. He heard a loud crash of thunder (somehow it didn't wake me or my wife up), and then he heard every phone in the house ring briefly. Then the picture on the TV got all messed up for a few seconds (he had fallen asleep with it on again.)
The went back to normal on its own, but none of the phones were working. We figured it was an outage, but we later found out that none of the neighbors' phones were out. My son, who knows a little bit about wiring (OK, a lot more than I do), decided to take a look at the phone box on the house. He told me that when he opened it up, all the wires had been knocked loose. He's guessing that lightning hit the house and the force knocked all the phone wires out of their connectors.
Luckily, the only thing that was damaged was one of the phones -- of course, it had to be the one and only cordless. But at least the TVs, computers, and any pricey electronics were OK. I have them all on surge protectors. None of the simple electrical appliances -- lamps, microwave, etc. seemed to be damaged either.
Pretty scary.
with forgetting to plug in our old microwave in a surge protector in the kitchen months ago which fried it up when lightning hit it. I'm glad it's nothing horribly major, though at least you have a good idea of what happened with your house phones.
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