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Austin's first real cold front of the fall arrives next week with the first widespread storms in weeks, and the routers, modems and computers that survived a record-hot September are about to face a different threat: lightning, power flickers and surges. Here is the short checklist to run this weekend so your home network and your data come through the front without a repair bill.
The Austin American-Statesman reported on Friday, September 25 that models show the first real front of the season pushing into Texas, with rain chances rising Tuesday night and as much as 2 inches possible between Tuesday and Thursday. KXAN's First Warning team is calling for scattered to numerous showers and storms Wednesday and Thursday, with extra moisture from Hurricane Polo boosting the totals, and highs falling from near 100 into the 80s. After a dry stretch that long, the first storms tend to be the messy ones, and messy storms are what fill our schedule with dead modems and routers that never came back on.
We see three patterns after a front like this one rolls through Central Texas:
None of this needs a direct hit. It needs gear plugged straight into the wall, which describes most homes we walk into.
You have Saturday, Sunday and Monday before the rain chances climb. Work through this list in order.
Walk the house and look behind the TV, under the desk and in the closet where the internet comes in. The modem, router, mesh points, network switch, desktop PC, NAS or backup drive, and the smart-home hub are the pieces that matter most. Anything on a bare wall outlet or a plain power strip with no surge rating goes on the fix list.
A power strip is not a surge protector. If the strip does not print a joule rating on the label, it is a splitter, nothing more.
Buy a surge protector rated at 1,000 joules or more with an indicator light that shows the protection is still working. Surge protectors wear out; every hit uses up part of their capacity, and a five-year-old strip that has been through a few Texas storm seasons may protect nothing at all. If the indicator light is off, replace the strip.
For cable internet, use a protector with coax pass-through, or add an inline coax surge arrester between the wall and the modem. For fiber, the incoming line is glass and carries no surge, but the power brick for the fiber terminal still needs protection.
A compact UPS (uninterruptible power supply) in the 600 to 900 VA range costs less than most routers and rides your modem, router and mesh base through every flicker the front throws at you. That keeps the Wi-Fi up, keeps the cameras recording, and keeps the router from doing a dirty reboot dozens of times a night. It also lets you shut a desktop down cleanly. Plug only the network gear and one computer into the battery side; TVs and speakers go on the surge-only outlets.
Most routers have a backup or export option under their administration or system page. Save the settings file to your phone or laptop before the storms. If a flicker wipes the configuration, restoring it takes two minutes instead of an hour of re-entering Wi-Fi names, passwords, port forwards and parental controls. Mesh systems managed through an app usually keep the settings in the cloud, but check that the app can still see every node today rather than discovering a dead one on Thursday.
A power blink during a write is the most common way we see a drive lose files. Run a full backup of every computer this weekend: Time Machine on a Mac, File History or a full image on Windows, and a cloud backup for the folders that cannot be recreated. Then unplug the external backup drive when it finishes and set it on a shelf. A drive that is not plugged in cannot be hit by a surge. If you rely on a NAS, confirm it is on the battery side of the UPS and that its own scheduled backup ran within the last week.
If backups have been on the someday list, our data backup and recovery page explains what a sensible setup looks like for a household and how we set one up in a single visit.
When the lightning is close on Wednesday or Thursday, pull the plug on the expensive desktop, the gaming console and the TV if you are home. A surge protector is a filter, not a guarantee, and a direct or very close strike can overwhelm a good one. Unplugged gear has nothing to filter.
Outdoor cameras, the Wi-Fi extender on the patio and the low-voltage transformer for landscape lighting all take the weather directly. Make sure their cable connections are inside a weatherproof box or at least pointed downward, and that any Ethernet run that goes outside and comes back in passes through an Ethernet surge protector at the entry point. An unprotected outdoor Ethernet run is the single most effective way to bring a lightning surge straight into your network switch.
The front will pass, the power will return, and some homes will find the Wi-Fi gone. Before calling anyone, work through these steps:
If you get through that list and still have nothing, or the router boots but forgets its settings every few minutes, something inside took damage. Our home network and Wi-Fi service covers diagnosing exactly which piece failed and replacing it with something sized for the house, and device troubleshooting and repair handles the computer that will not turn on after a blink.
If you do one thing this weekend, buy a decent surge protector and move the modem and router onto it. If you do two, add the small UPS. Those two purchases cost less than a single service call and cover the failures we see most after every storm that rolls through Austin.
Spend twenty minutes on the checklist above and the only thing you will notice on Thursday is the weather.
If you would rather have someone else set it up, or the storm has already taken something out, book a visit or get in touch and we will get the network back up.
