turning my system on during lightning storms


Does anybody do this

I've been listening to my system sparingly as we've had a large amount of lightning storms and find myself turning the system off quite often at the first sound of a storm approaching

Does surge protection really help ??
musicfile
My house took a bad lightning hit on 7/5/06- I'll never forget it. Totally destroyed the hot tub. It damaged a lot of electrical gear in the house too. I had surge protectors on my gear- Stereo, TV, Home theatre, and PC but everything with a three prong plug was damaged. The TV's and equipment that had two prong plugs were fine. The new hot tub has it's own ground rod now. btw- the large oak tree next to the house that provided the path in for the lightning (I was on the back porch and saw the lightning hit) was removed and we have had no more issues.
I unplug during a storm when I am home, but, I am not always home during a storm at the house...
What to do ???

The second posting on this thread was from Reubent. He suggested a whole house surge suppressor installed at the meter box, is not an option ?
I would at least turn the system off. A surge from a lightning strike hit my stereo in the 80s and mess up several compenents - Teac tape deck, Yamaha preamp. They were never right again after that although I sent them back for repair several times. Surge protectors may have improved but they always have a lag before the protection kicks in. When a storm comes be very careful IME.
The only time I saw damage from lightning was a couple decades ago. Computer terminals connected by hardwire to servers were getting destroyed following lighting storms. The hardwire data connections were the path for the induced potentials. We specified inexpensive lightning protection devices on the data lines ( they were around $50 per unit) and never lost another terminal. It has been a while and I cannot recall the name of the company. However we went for the fastest protection, the down side was that the fastest protective devices gave up the ghost in doing their duty, which a few did. But at that time a computer monitor was going for $500 so the $50 loss was acceptable. Lightning usually gets coupled via a path other than the power lines, i.e. a cable, antenna, etc. But it certainly can come in via the power lines. Suggestion is to find a device that does nothing but protect against lightning, whose primary selling point is speed, and that is not designed specifically for audio equipment. In general you will get a better product of that type by staying with industry standards for protection of data equipment. Try any large company that sells markets the protection for computer systems. Preferably one that can be purchased either direct or through one of the large electronics distribution houses. I am a little suspect of the stuff designed specifically for high end audio and sold by high end audio marketing - just too small of a market and too riddled with overpriced gimmicks. If the industrial quality products don't do what they promise, the companies don't last long, so their is a little more assurance of the quality of product if the manufacturer has been at it a while and has a business clientele.
Tonywinsc - your damage of three prong devices suggest that lightning hiting tree/ground near the house creates big voltage differential between earth ground and neutral wires. Switching off equipment would not help since switch is on the hot wire. Recently I looked at power strips in Tiger.com store and the most expensive one not only had the most of Joules but also different split betweens tree lines. It had acually less Joules than cheaper one on the hot wire and much more between ground and neutral.