We've had exciting weather now and again here too. My favorite was a lightning strike on one of the lightning rods I have over my solar arrays, which was around 6' horizontally from where I was sitting (on the outside of the wall, of course) - working on a server. What was fascinating about it was that while everything in the room went "click" and jumped a little from the huge H field, there was no bang for ~ 100ms or so - directly under the bolt evidently is a dead zone! So what I heard was the first echos from the surrounding hills. And FWIW, nothing fried at all. No real antennas to the sensitive stuff - even the phone/DSL wire is buried for miles and only a little comes out of the ground to go to the modem/router. My AC power of course is all very short wires from the inverter sitting next to the batteries in their own shed at the ground...
To top it off...I have a loop of copper pipe running all the way around both floors of my shop at ceiling height, grounded too - it's my compressed air system, so it acts like a big shorted turn...a LF faraday cage I guess.
Back when I fixed consumer electronic gear...I saw a lot of burnt stuff...I took pains when I built that place to avoid as much of it as I could. Having a high peak current arc in the fusor setup is now the big risk, and it can get to 100 kiloamps easy with the high-Q incidental capacities involved.
This is a fairly big deal for me, I finally got the shop its own pi to monitor the rain barrel. Now I can remotely see if there's water in it, and roughly the quality of it.
If it's there but cloudy - I can send it to the clothes washing setup. If good, to the cistern in my crawl space for later use in the living space...which now has a nice reverse osmosis system for potable water too.
The rain barrel size is an interesting engineering compromise. Any decent rain I get a heck of a lot more than that 60 gallons or so. But! I don't want water standing in there, as sun + crud = algae and that's a problem for using the water for much of anything, also clogging things up. If there's any pollen (my main pollutant these days) becuase of season and lack of rain for awhile, I want overflow to happen to float it out of there before using any, and may have to let the remaining water stand for a day or so to let whatever will settle do that. Too small a rain barrel and I don't collect enough water and have to go fetch it with a barrel and the truck and pump from some nearby creek. Too big and it never removes the floaters via overflow. I have a coarse screen on the top to keep out small animals, rocks, leaves, and a finer filter on the outlet, as well as having the outlet not quite at the bottom, so stuff that sinks has a place to go. Then further filtering in the cistern later, followed by the osmosis system for drinking and cooking.
But one thing I never had was a way to see what was going on there without showing up in person. You'd not think that was a big deal, but...it is. Because of the small size of the barrel, often it's raining like hell and overflowing, and I want to check that it IS overflowing and the water is good enough to let into the maybe-low cistern, so as to not waste rain barrel capacity with extra overflow...and then it's dark and it's raining, not a fun time to jump up and go look (often late at night too).
So I put a camera on the thing, looking down into it, and made a submersible light fixture to make bright white light at the bottom of the barrel. That way I can see if the water is cloudy or not, and how much there is, no matter what, from the couch. Not shown in this pic are some other weather sensors - the usual temp, humidity, barometer, inside and out, as it's easy and good to have another at that building - where I live, the difference between temp and humidity can be large in a short distance - one building is at the forest edge, shaded, the other out high and dry on the plain...so it's nice to get a couple readings - and I assume I can use the multiple barometers to check one another (they can be flakey).
Not much to see in this screenshot taken this AM but here it is. The wire coming in from the right is for the lights at the bottom.
- About 10" of water in there now. Funny looking crud at the bottom - water is very clear.
Posting as just me, not as the forum owner. Everything I say is "in my opinion" and YMMV -- which should go for everyone without saying.