grounding a garage door sensor

[MikeB]

We've had a large # of very bad thunderstorms here in the area recently, and I believe one of my garage doors took a hit a few weeks back. I ended up finding that the plug-in module monitoring the sensors on my doors was damaged. The casing on it was warped/melted. Now that I've replaced it, I've found that one of my sensors is no longer working.

My guess is that my metal garage door took a lightning hit, fried the sensor, and went up the line and fried my garage door module.

Is this a freak incident, and I'm par for the course - or is there something I can/should be doing to protect myself against something like this?

Thanks!

 

[BrettS]

I think it's pretty common for magnetic reed switches to get damaged by a lightening strike anywhere in or near the house. I think they're pretty sensitive and I'm not sure that grounding them would really do much good.

 

[MikeB]

I think it's pretty common for magnetic reed switches to get damaged by a lightening strike anywhere in or near the house. I think they're pretty sensitive and I'm not sure that grounding them would really do much good.

Thanks for the reply. I guess what concerns me the most is the damage that was done to the EZIO module that reads that sensor, and how it was melted/warped. Want to make sure there's nothing further I can do to ensure that I'm being as safe as possible.

 

[personalt]

I think it's pretty common for magnetic reed switches to get damaged by a lightening strike anywhere in or near the house. I think they're pretty sensitive and I'm not sure that grounding them would really do much good.

Thanks for the reply. I guess what concerns me the most is the damage that was done to the EZIO module that reads that sensor, and how it was melted/warped. Want to make sure there's nothing further I can do to ensure that I'm being as safe as possible.

what about a wireless sensor? I have wireless that has a tilt sensor in it.. this way I dont even need a contact magnet. I just mount near the top and when the door opens that sensor rotates back.

 

[LightenUP]

Do you have a part number for this tilt sensor? I am very curious about this.

 

[personalt]

Do you have a part number for this tilt sensor? I am very curious about this.

EV-DW319

It is made by a company that makes sensors that work with GE, Caddx, ITX. It works real well so far and looks well made

 

[MikeB]

Lost another sensor and the EZIO module during a thunderstorm a couple weeks back. Damn metal garage doors! Seriously thinking about going with a wireless sensor, like the TriggerLinc...

 

[beelzerob]

Damn, Mike.... I think if I was seeing symptoms which led to the diagnosis "Ya, you were struck by lightning" twice in one year, I'd think about moving!

 

[Neurorad]

There SHOULD be a way to optically decouple the signal, an interconnect-type of device that provides a physical gap in the signal wire.

This should work for ANY signal in a wire - why isn't this done routinely?

You could look into improving your lightning protection, with lightning rods on the roof? Or, just keep replacing hardware...

 

[MikeB]

Damn, Mike.... I think if I was seeing symptoms which led to the diagnosis "Ya, you were struck by lightning" twice in one year, I'd think about moving!

Yeah, no kidding... if I were losing anything else, I'd certainly consider it!

 

[BioSehnsucht]

There SHOULD be a way to optically decouple the signal, an interconnect-type of device that provides a physical gap in the signal wire.

This should work for ANY signal in a wire - why isn't this done routinely?

You could look into improving your lightning protection, with lightning rods on the roof? Or, just keep replacing hardware...

If lightening is involved, you're probably still screwed, unless you build your own opto-isolator with a nice long length of fiber optic cable or something between the light emitter and detector circuits. Integrated ones (chip packaged) generally only good into the thousands of volts (i.e. 7500V for 1second or such) before failing. While a normal overvoltage failure might just kill the package, a lightning strike will probably just jump straight through the package and keep going if it wants to.