Hi,
A lighting strike has fallen near a plant where we were using a TL-WDR3600 and a TL-WR1043ND V2. The former died immediately, when i came to see there were all the leds turned on on minus one, the last, that was blinking. The latter, apparently was ok, and worked till 3 days after the wdr3600 was gone. Then it gave the same symptoms. I opened the WDR3600 and noticed that the atheros chip under the switch transformers was hot, though there was no smoke coming out of it. The same happened on the 1043ND.  Its ending will remain a mistery.

Question:In similar situations, is it possible to bring back to life these boards by swapping the probably damaged components surrounding the hot chip, or is that chip burned for sure even if it isn't pierced or emit smoke? Did someone here ever tried?

I'm sorry if someone could think that it's better to buy such equipment new, but i really can't figure out how could a thunderstruck router can continue to work for 3 days before shutting down forever.

The tplink power supply received the damage. After 3 days it die. Did you test the router with other 12v power supply ?

This event is most probably caused by induced current surge in power grid or induced current between equipment with different ground connection.

Just tested with another power supply. It's fried. Maybe it's better to use a surge protected power supply to prevent this in future, and avoid using all these wall warts...

(Last edited by arny91 on 5 Oct 2015, 11:52)

Check if onboard dc-dc converters show any signs of life. If power is delivered to the chips, then you can tell for sure that at least one of them is fried. Also, gigabit switch chips can get hot during normal operation too.

use a serial TTl adapter and see error message if it gets on it has to show some sort of message