Tlaloc strikes down apon us... or maybe is was Zeus.

So, it was a fairly normal Friday afternoon.  Seemed a little windy outside, but all in all, a fairly normal work day. Wind in Wellington is as normal as sand in the Sahara.

We finished up at a normalish time, sometime after 4 and went home.

As we approached the house,  I clicked the button so that the handy electric garage door would open and we could drive in and park, as normal.

Nothing happened.

Very strange, but we've had power cuts before so I thought it was probably just something like that.  I parked outside, and we went in to investigate. 

Sure enough, there was no power.  I went to the switch board : two of the trips had been.... er... tripped? Anyway, I clicked them back, and the lights came back on.  Nice one!

But our joy was short lived.

As we made our way into the house we noticed a few things.

• The security system's little control panel was blank.  It's got a battery backup, so this was surprising.  In previous power cuts, it usually flashed "problem" or something.  Not this time.
• The hot water system's control panel was also blank.  Well, sometimes it turns off after a power cut, but the "on" button didn't seem to do anything.
• The HRV's little control screen was also blank.  On button also useless.

As we made out way through the house, we discovered lots of things that no longer worked:

1. The cordless phone was dead. In fact it was producing smoke (quickly unplugged)
2. Our little Netgear wireless router smelled funny. Didn't work.
3. Little flatscreen TV/monitor combo also quite dead.
4. Big TV in our bedroom : giant paperweight.
5. USB hub: not hubbing.
6. Sony Home Theatre thing : useless.
7. Little sony hi-fi (lives in the spare bedroom) - forever silent.
8. iPod stereo thingy.  Very handy when it worked. No longer handy.
9. All the Telstra stuff (cable tv & internet) mostly dead.  Also, most of the house's phone lines were dead (only one remained).
10. My Macbook Pro works, but doesn't work from the battery at all.  I don't know if it simply can't charge it, or if the actually battery is munted.  At least we can use it plugged in.
11. My friends old laptop which I was wiping & reinstalling for her to resell now just shows a useless white screen.  No idea if it's booting properly.  Sorry guys :(
12. Our main living room TV seems to work OK, except for one of the HDMI ports.  Which is a bit of a pain.

At first we were quite surprised because Jacqui's little netbook laptop seemed to have survived nicely.  It wasn't until a few days later when we were going to use it for something that we realised it wasn't able to charge its battery either.  So, it's dead now too . Unfortunately it isn't even able to run from main power.

So what the hell happened?  Did a gremlin break into the house and wreak havoc?  Was it a plague of imps?

Well no, nothing like that.

Our house (along with 4 or 5 of our neighbours) suffered a lightening strike.

Have to say, our landlords T&P were excellent : we had hot water within 24 hours and the security & HRV systems will be back online soon.

As for all our busted stuff, we had to arrange a electrician's report for the insurance.  We had a guy out on Friday, but so far he hasn't done his bit.   Once he sends his report to the insurance folks I guess we'll either get the stuff repaired or replaced. Which will be nice :)