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ck2

aren't there other old-school people like me that shut down everything at end of day and restart the next?

can't be hacked if it's completely off

can't get struck by lightning or surges if the surge-strip is flipped off

fans and spinning drives have lifetime on motors

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>can't get struck by lightning or surges if the surge-strip is flipped off

That's not how electricity works. Hot may be open but your ground and return is not.

that's an interesting thought but would violate physics for lightning to come in through the ground line?

No. This isn't some theoretical Star Trek neutrino emissions scenario. Lightning punches-out wherever it hits, including ground, which is directly connected to neutral.

i think this isn't common knowledge; as it's only tied at one panel, and separate in the other (in the US); so there's two busses in the main breaker panel, one for white and one for green/bare. It's only the utility/ingress panel that has the neutral and ground bonded. It's a fluke of the way we deliver power in the US, split phase, maybe.

Lightning is electricity that goes through hundreds of meters or even kilometers of air (supposedly a good electrical insulator) to reach the ground, it's not above travelling through electrical lines the opposite way they're intended to be used.

it can jump from wherever it is to your highly attractive ground line

High voltage electric arcs can be surprisingly long. The tiny cap in strip is not enough to protect in nearby hits. For that fully disconnecting or proper separation is need.

i thought half of lightning came from the ground, like half the potential. Slow mo lightning strikes have them meeting in the center in the air, rather than striking from cloud to ground. I could be wrong.

Lightning hit an antenna that was disconnected but near a radio and blew up the radio, the PC it was connected to, and then everything connected to the switch that was connected to the PC via cat5, and just for good measure, everything connected to an outlet on that side of the house within 15' of the computer outlet. once it gets in, it doesn't matter if stuff is off or on or whatever.

“Ground is 0v everywhere” is a rule of thumb with a surprisingly limited scope of validity, not physics.

Yes, i shutdown my pc every day. Maybe it's a habit from old times when i was living with my family and we really had to count every cent.

The only thing that usually runs all the time is my mini-pc, which i use as a server but due to the ongoing heat (and me not using it much at the moment), i've shut that down as well.

I guess I'm old-school then too. I `shutdown now` once I'm done for the day. It takes all of a few seconds to start back up. I see literally no value in keeping it on overnight.

Then again, I primarily use a desktop, so that probably factors in.

I have a home office with a desktop workstation. I shut down at EOD. When I worked in an office we were instructed by IT to leave the machines running overnight and they would run their scans and nonsense outside working hours, which was neat.

I do the same. I am not a fan of laptops preferring instead to sit down at a desktop to work. When I'm done I exit all my programs and shut down. I don't understand people who drag their computer state around everywhere.

Lightning is a special case because it will jump through the air, regardless of the surge switch status.

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