Personally, while not the ideal repair I find what you did more than acceptable. I would do similar on my own house. The critical part is the application of the grease afterward.
Heck I would choose to buy a new panel for the parts to repair the existing one (if not available separately) before I swapped out the entire box. Swapping panels is a huge job.
My last house had issues with light flickering when I bought it. Nothing noted in the inspection but they do not remove the breaker panel. Once off, it was apparent. The main feed was AL wire with zero grease. The wire was expectedly oxidized. I fixed it myself, you could hardly tell where the meter tamper seal was compromised…
I had a similar issue with my first house after I got married. It was built in the 70s and used aluminum wiring. One light in the kitchen flickered and I inspected the light switch. The wires broke into pieces when I disconnected them from the switch. I cut the wires back to good aluminum then installed a copper pigtail, using grease at the aluminum/copper joint to avoid future galvanic destruction. This was the original installation. I’m lucky there wasn’t a fire.
I don’t think there’s much use of aluminum wiring for inside the house in new home construction these days. But the wire from the power pole to the house is often aluminum. So where it connects to the meter could become problematic, which I presume is what occurred in TT’s case.
New home construction codes sometimes a little puzzling. In my area they require fire prevention sprinklers in the ceiling, and that the water pressure input to the sprinkler be visible on a meter on the outside of the house, in case anyone wants to know if the sprinkler system is pressurized with adequate pressure. Requires large diameter pipes, 2- 3 inch diameter, feed the sprinkler system from the water meter, even though the pipe to the water meter is 3/4 inch … lol … I guess there’s some logic to all that, but seems overkill.
Yes, that dangerous practice was common in houses built during the ‘70s. My parents’ home was like that, but–luckily–we never had any electrical problems in that house before we sold it in 1999.
Sprinkler systems save lives. It’s overkill until you have a fire in your house and it saves the lives of everyone inside. Kinda like seatbelts and airbags.
The power guys had done it properly at the meter. The issue was the main feed at the panel terminals. 200A service, pole drop to house was AL. House was copper from panel.
House was modern log home construction. I was surprised when the insurance quote was 2-3x expected. Insurance guy explained, this is a log home. When they burn, they burn to the ground.
Perhaps sprinklers could have mitigated that but they can cause damage too if the system leaks…
I was once responsible for the ESD protectionprogram at a large electronics manufacturer. A big risk was from induced potentials created by things like synthetic clothing, long hair, etc. getting too close to (though not touching) semiconductor containing equipment during assembly or repair, and also from improperly grounded people/equipment touching circuitry. When a circuit was obviously damaged we’d fix it, but the larger worry was for latent damage that allowed a component to function long enough to pass testing only to fail months to years later while in service. IBM, who tracked things like this, figured that the bulk of IC failures during service were caused by this.
My take-away is that given some semiconductor circuitry in your car was destroyed, and the main ECU should have been pretty well protected against expected voltage spikes so it must have been a big event, that any semiconductor component that’s still functioning could have sustained latent damage that may show up later, or maybe not, but unless all semiconductors are replaced you’ll be left with some nagging doubt.
No disagreement, but the question remains whether that’s the best way for a homeowner to spend money for extra safety. For example instead of the sprinkler system, could spend the money on a system that showed what appliances were on, like the oven, stove elements, recent current draws, etc. Thereby giving the homeowner an opportunity to mitigate the common fire hazard of leaving the house and forgetting to turn the stove/oven/electric heaters off. Or just some of that, and a less perfect sprinkler system, like eliminating the large pipe requirement, monitoring system pressure, & sprinklers only covering the kitchen and/or the garage.
I have to wonder if the people working on this vehicle are assuming the worst and not considering the option of it being something simple such as a fuse or fusible link.
The weather here in OK gets pretty volatile and over the decades there’s been a number of very close lightning strikes with never any issues on mine or anyone else’s vehicles. Just last spring lightning split a 50 foot tall evergreen right down the middle and it was in close proximity to 4 cars in my drive.
A home builder friend of mine fell asleep on the sofa one night (late movie) and around midnight lightning struck the chimney on his home. It had three 9 foot wide garage doors and it blew all of them 30 to 40 feet out into the drive along with dislodging fireplace stones, knocking kitchen cabinets loose, sheetrock and nails popped everywhere, and even dropped a hunk of sheet rock onto his sleeping daughter. It also knocked the sleeping buddy right off the sofa. His first thought upon snapping awake was a natural gas explosion. The cars in the garage suffered no damages or issues at all even with Armageddon happening all around.
Just saying this because over the decades I’ve seen a fair number of cars getting everything replaced from A to Z when the root cause was something cheap and easy. It seems to me there can be what I would call a misguided fear of electrics and the best bet is to start with A; not Z.
Many an ECU/ECM/PCM/whatever have been replaced needlessly on wild guessing and I have to wonder if there is something like a popped fuse or fuse link at play.
Some years ago a shop here swapped an engine out in a Buick. With the “new” used engine still a no-start. Cause? A single ground wire with a poor connection. That’s disgusting and embarassing at the same time. Shop owner has no conscience and one of his favorite sayings was “Anyone who needs diagnostic equipment to figure out a problem is not much of a mechanic…”. E.G. a total hack and blight on the profession.
A few thoughts keep coming to me about this problem. One is whether or not the problem is actually related to a lightning strike. The car is 9 years old and just because there was a nearby lightning strike that does not mean it is the cause of a no-run condition. My gut feeling is no.
A no-start could easily be caused by something like a crank sensor or even moisture in the air since lightning was involved.
My Sonoma was going through a no-start condition some years ago after storms and on mornings when the humidity was very high due to an elevated dew point. The moisture in the air was basically grounding out all of the plug wires; preventing an ignition spark. I fixed that problem by applying dielectric grease to the plug boots, plug/coil wire terminals. Never an issue since.
If this was a matter of engine cranks over fine but won’t sputter or barely sputter I tend to think there is a moisture induced plug boot issue.
There’s a ton of wind turbines around me and all are loaded down with electronics and computers. Every single one of them is peppered around the top of the towers with burn marks from lightning strikes and it does not phase them. One in southern OK got hit just right last spring and caught on fire but that is a different issue.
My parents had a house with aluminum wiring when I was young. They sold it due to all the problems they had and the cost to have it completely rewired. Obviously they didn’t make connectors that were compatible with Al back then or they weren’t common.
I definitely feel you get cumulative damage from power problems on electronics as well. It seems that a new system will often take a close hit better than one that has been in service a few years. Part of this might be that if I install, I usually include a pretty decent surge protector in the deal. These often start to degrade pretty well after 2 years of Missouri storms and power surges so that might be part of the deal. As mentioned, not all fail the day of the storm but I see a lot more odd random damage in the days or weeks following so there has to be latent damage that isn’t immediately apparent.
Also, the owner will often complain that they could no longer get their computer to turn off. It would shut down and come right back on after a strike, then a few weeks later it totally quits.
Surge protectors do wear out with use. Even worse are prolonged and repeated periods of low or high voltage that cause significant heat dissipation in the device or unit. as you noted 2-5 years is the expected lifespan under normal conditions. Areas prone to lightning storms are likely to be on the lower end of that range for effective use. Worst part, you never know they are worn out until they don’t protect something so it has to be proactive replacement.
One of the most common surge protector devices used in commercial electronics, the Metal Oxide Varistor (MOV) is rapidly degraded with use. We won’t design those into our products for this reason even if customers initially insist on using them.
Given their size and placement one would imagine that wind turbines are designed with lightening strikes in mind, as are airplanes. I suspect that car electronics is designed to survive insults from alternator generated spikes, surges associated with connecting jumper cables, etc., but those exposed to lightning may be too few to care about. .
A lot of the tech industry suggests a two year replacement cycle on surge protectors, whether you THINK you need it or not. It seems to be a much harder sell to get customers to buy a new surge protector every two years than to sell them a complete new unit and charge them for all the setup labor, data recovery and transfer from their old unit, installation and configuration of applications, and all that. I always aim for something in the 4000 Joule range and tell them the old one is fine to use for lamps and Christmas lights if they don’t want me to recycle it.
Don’t even get me started on the amount of money people throw away on scams and then have to pay more money to deal with cleaning up the aftermath. Scams seem to be everywhere and people just keep doing them like they are playing a sport or something.
I am guessing car electronics are not designed to withstand a direct lightning strike or a close one because of the added cost. I have a hard time selling someone a $50-100 device to protect their equipment until they have to pay several thousand to repair and replace damaged equipment. It is an easy sell at that time.
Yup!
I know a guy who I can’t convince of the need for good Antivirus protection for his computer. “Too expensive”, he says.
So, he frequently surfs into some of the sleaziest gutters on the internet, and then has to pay his “computer nerd” (his term, not mine) to come to his house to debug the computer. That guy also tries to convince him to install Antivirus protection, but he is adamant that it is “too expensive”.
This guy “saves money” by paying his “computer nerd” to come to his home several times each year in order to get his machine up and running again, and I think he pays ~$50 for each service visit. I am surprised that he can still walk, considering how often he shoots himself in the foot.
I’m still curious as to the situation with this car at the time of the failure. If the car was running well before the near miss lightning strike and would not start afterwards and since it can be assumed there was rain involved and/or high humidity that brings up the moisture induced secondary ignition possibility. Offhand, it sounds to me that the skeet shooting parts guns were in operation and I have to wonder if those component replacements were based on a genuine diagnosis or whether it was a “probably the ECU” WAG.
Point being is that someone could have a lot of egg on their face if the fix is a 5 dollar tube of dielectric grease. I’ve seen that a number of times even when it is not raining. High humidity or even a damp fog can cause no-starts around here. As I mentioned, that happened to my Sonoma a few times and even my Lincoln a few times with the fix being a dab of grease.
Yes, I know the feeling. I charge WAY more than $50 but people still take the risk. The AV I like at this time is Avast. They have a free version but it leaves out some protection that “click zombies” as I call them would greatly benefit from. It used to be like $25 but has gone up to $36 or so per year so not bad. I used to suggest a Russian AV but no more for obvious reasons.
The sleaziest gutters of the internet are actually not the most dangerous from what I see. Russian crime syndicates, likely state sponsored, setup all kinds of “bait” sites like recipes, crafting ideas, and “life hacks”. These seem to really target women in the senior citizen demographic. They are innocently surfing and finding a recipe when a message pops up to call “Microsoft” because their computer is hacked/infected and the rest is history. Those shared on Facebook are just as bad for this as well.
They used to just install a remote access tool like AnyDesk, TeamViewer, etc. but now have been reprogramming the UEFI BIOS of computers. Again, this is a nation-state type exploit. The first couple of these blindsided me. I wiped the unit completely clean and then two weeks later they got hit out of nowhere. Basically, they want the user to feel their computer is safe and start using it normally again and trusting it to contain their personal and financial data. Then they hit. This issue MIGHT be fixable of you completely crash the BIOS and do a crisis recovery but that is also a risky bet. No one is willing to take the risk, especially when I explain the risk and explain that I won’t guarantee the work I do because of this unknown. Of course it might be several weeks to see if they can get back in and the fix might turn the computer into a paperweight. I have replaced several impacted systems now.
The last user this happened to had her identity stolen and ALL accounts connected to that computer stolen by Russian hackers.
Yes, not having a proper AV and taking other precautions is a huge risk. This isn’t the most interesting work I do by sure but I do it frequently and there is good money to be made and plenty of job security with all the “click zombies” out there. Not spending just a few bucks to avoid this is like those who don’t change their oil or do other things to their car because it costs “too much money” or they “cannot afford it.” The cost of not doing so far exceeds the prevention.
Some years ago a helicopter taking 16 workers to/from an oil drill platform, flying above the North Sea (England), got hit by lightening and crashed into water; thankfully nobody seriously injured as I recall. Helicopters are designed to still fly after lightening strike. In this case the design of one of the rotor blade components was changed from aluminum, to a carbon-fiber component. Seemed like a good idea I suppose, carbon fiber strong and light weight. The lightening strike current heated the carbon fiber enough to cause it to separate from the rotor. So with lightening, pretty much anything is possible I guess.
by paying his “computer nerd” to come to his home several times each year in order to get his machine up and running again, and I think he pays ~$50 for each service visit. I am surprised that he can still walk, considering how often he shoots himself in the foot.