A client called us on a Monday morning: nothing in the office worked. Not “the internet’s slow” — nothing. No network, half the desk phones were off, one workstation was stuck on a boot screen that never finished loading. A storm came through Saturday night, and by the time anyone was back in the building, the damage was done.
The instinct is to assume the server was hit. It wasn’t. The server room had a proper surge protector on a dedicated circuit, and it was fine. What failed was scattered across a dozen desks — cheap power bars, some of them years old, a few that had never been rated for surge protection at all, extension cords with a row of outlets and a switch. A power bar gives you more places to plug in. A surge protector is designed to limit the damage from an electrical surge, and not every power bar has that protection built in.
Why the damage seems random
A surge doesn’t always damage a device outright. It can take a hit that shortens its life, which is part of why the failures don’t line up with any obvious pattern. One phone dead, the one next to it fine. One workstation stuck, the identical model two desks over working normally. A power bar that does protect against surges should carry a certification mark from a recognized agency such as CSA or UL. A five-dollar power bar may have neither, even when it looks the part.
What costs the most
Replacing a phone that’s stopped working or a fried network switch is a known cost. What isn’t accounted for is the day and a half nobody in the office could do real work while everything got diagnosed, replaced, and reconfigured — lost productivity, and for some businesses, lost customer confidence while things are down.
How things look now, after the fixes
Every desk has a proper surge-rated power bar — not whatever was lying around — and the client’s electrician wired a surge protector in at the electrical panel, so the network equipment is protected before the power reaches the outlet. It’s a small fix, but it can be the difference between a rough start to a Monday morning and a normal one the next time a storm rolls through.
If your office is running on power bars that happened to be around when everyone moved in, look at them before the next storm does. If you’d like our team to walk through your office and check the power bars and network equipment, book a free 15-minute discovery call and we’ll set up a visit.
