Electricity?

[traveltunes]

Does anyone out there, who doesn't have a surge protector on their unit, unhook the unit from the power source? We are having some bad thunderstorms here and I was wondering what everyone else was doing in this situation?

[kwolff7]

It wouldn't hurt to unplug from the electricity if you are having a bad electrical storm, because if you get hit by lightning it will take everything electrical out. You can run your lights, water, toliet off of the battery.

[stiles watson]

I agree with Karen. The risks are the same as your stick house. If you get a near hit, you can experience significant damage to your electrical equipment and appliances. I speak from the experience for having it happen at my stick house twice before I added the whole house surge protection to it. The vulnerability is the same for your RV. The difference is you CAN unplug your RV.

[Montana Sky]

I leave my coach plugged in from April - October, have never unplugged it because of a thunderstorm. I will lower the TV antenna and turn off the booster, but thats about it.

[ken]

We were in a campgrounds here in Va and saw what happens when a lighting strike hits the electrical power gird. we had disconnected our power and was running on the batteries. Two people near us did not. It took out the inverter on a Class A motor home and a hughs autoformer on a 5th wheel. The autoformer has a built in surge protector. It saved his 5th wheel. I always use our autoformer between the 30 amp power sorce and our Montana. i use a 50 amp surge protector on the 50 amp.

[campbud]

When it is lightening we always disconnect from the electricity to be on the safe side. We will put the tv antennia down too. These storms lately can be really nasty. I hope they move on out of your area and quickly.


Kathy

[sreigle]

We never have disconnected because of storms but if lightning were very close we probably would. Without a generator, that means no AC, so we'd have to make a risk analysis and decide whether to risk it. Expensive if we guess wrong.

[noneck]

Good one! I have done this about 2x in 24 years RVing. Yes, good idea to disconnect if you are able to anticipate a storm arrival.

[exav8tr]

Here goes another seemingly stupid question (I know there are no stupid questions). If you disconnect from shore power, and you have an inverter, can you still watch TV while storm passes or is that not a good idea? I realize that if you are dependent on the antenna for reception that you will probably lose that if it is down, but what about CG cable??.....I think I need to take a class on electricity, converters, inverters, DC power, generators and everything else connected to the RV.....

Phil