I realize 99% of the internet are experts on electricity, lightning and grounding concepts, most of the internet wears a lab coat at all times, but seriously… I need a 100’ run of buried ethernet (likely direct burial 24" deep) from my house to my shed that has no power, for PoE camera & AP. Companies like APC sell ethernet surge protectors, other than biased unfounded fear, what are real world implications of a nearby lighting strike if things are properly grounded (full 6-8’ grounding rods outside each building etc…).
I feel like it’d be perfectly fine and if not, oh well, a router gets fried or wire burns up in the ground, doesn’t seem like a big deal on the off chance of real close strike or is that just me?
I’ve yet to see one stop 100% of a close lightning strike, but I have seen it reduce damage a good 100x on the other side of it vs. before it. I see boxes with covers blown off full of black soot, vaporized copper wire, and charred circuit boards on the half upstream of a surge protector outside of a building, and then the half on the inside of the building that is guarded by the surge protector just has a few blown SMD compontnes on the circuit board which still fried the equipement inside as I tried to replace those parts and found the traces in the layers of the circuit boards got fried too.
So everything still got fried anyways, but the damage was suppressed a lot by the surge protector in-line of the ethernet. It stopped a fire from possibly starting in the building by stopping a lot of the blast inside of equipment.