I recently had a power surge at my house, and some devices on my surge protectors died (graphics card, tv, modem) but others were fine (router, xbox, apple tv). I don’t understand what the difference was, can surge protectors be explained more on how they work?
In: Technology
It would be odd for a device to be behind a protector and have that device die from a surge while other devices are protected. Generally a protector does a more “all or nothing” kind of deal.
On the other hand, with some protectors not all outlets are actually protected. It would be much more common to plug 6 devices into a protector and only have 3 protected outlets. That’s not uncommon.
But having said all that, your protector may have entirely failed and some devices were killed by the surge while others were not. Some devices are just more robust than others, and there’s a component of luck here as well. I once had a surge kill a fridge, but the TV (plugged into the other plug in the same outlet) was fine.
It’s also worth noting that it’s not only electrical lines that can carry a power surge. Basiclly any conductive line that goes outside could transmit a power surge, things like cable lines sometimes can kill a cable modem and have that modem send the surge down the ethernet cables and have it kill a PC.
In this case it’s odd that the Modem died but the router didn’t. So likely not that.
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