Hi Simon
I agree, and you've written it clearer than I could have.
Although - I *am* at the end of a large amount of overhead, and very dirty overhead at that, which sometimes drops for a minute or two. The voltage inside my house is around 240-245 too. And all of work's sites, similarly fed by 11kv overheads. Yet, touch wood, I've not had any power related equipment deaths in, well, forever.
One of our sites had a lightning strike very close to it last friday, incidentally. Close and loud enough for interior rooms to flash blue and as somebody was turning a kettle on at that time, for others to think she'd been electrocuted! I suspect a large EMP came through the phone line. This has, we think, killed the phone ports on our asterix server. It also, weirdly, killed one of the lan ports on a draytek router. Yet apart from that, everything was fine, including both that router and the d-link talktalk one restoring adsl immediately. On the power side, nothing.
That sounds like one of the biggest and closest strikes we've had for many years yet, no electrical damage whatsoever. Apart from the server which has a UPS, there is no filtration on site.
