UPS actually more potent at killing devices?

[Anonymous user]

Its been a sad day. We have had our home network protected with two APC UPS-550s  and an APC UPS-600. After a lightning storm and power surge this afternoon, several network devices died. 

The odd thing is that only devices connected to our UPS's died. Two of them allowed the death of a modem, router, irrigation controller and multiple switches. The last one seemed fine (this powered my server! I'm so glad I did not lose that!).

So my first question is: is there any explanation for this? Nothing else in the house died that we have found so far. Were we wrong to have our components attached to UPSs at all? 

Secondly, is there ever any kind of warranty or recourse from APC on stuff like this? Obviously we lost a good deal of money today, but frankly I felt like APC was a respectable brand and I'm sad to find not even their products were able to help. 

Any insight on how to prevent future failure or what to do from here would be great. 

Thanks for reading!

[BillP · Accepted solution]

Hi,

Sorry to hear of you inconvenience. Most all UPS include a equipment protection policy. Please contact local support at your earliest convenience and they will be happy to assist you. 

Local support contact information will be found at this link. 

https://www.apc.com/us/en/support/contact-us/index.jsp

[LalitKumar]

Dear, sorry fo your loss. I don't know much what setup you had, but for critical devices we prefer to use an isolation transformer before UPS so that the harmonic pulses during lightening could have a galvanic isolation. if it is expensive then at-least you should have used a separate dedicated earth conductor connected with all devices after UPS. if any lightening voltage surge travels to units connected to UPS gets grounded. it should never be connected with any electrical earthing before going to earth. You other non UPS devices grounding has saved them for component damage. Any surge coming to device must go to ground through its body.