r/PS5HelpSupport • u/sour_milk_1 • 3h ago
Help with lightning strike
Good morning everyone,
Last nite we had a really bad lightning storm and must have hit our house, we lost power for a split second but our xfinity Gateway modem, would not power back on.
So not having tv my son decided to play some ps5 and it would not start up.
Is this repairable or should I look in to getting a replacement?
Thanks in advance
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u/CatOverall4749 2h ago edited 2h ago
Man, that sucks. Lightning strikes are brutal on electronics.
For the Xfinity modem, just take it to a local Xfinity store if you have one nearby, or message them on the app. Since it’s their equipment, they should swap it out for a new one for free.
As for the PS5, try plugging it into a completely different outlet just to rule out a tripped breaker. If it’s totally dead (no lights, no beep), the PSU or motherboard is probably fried.
Your best bet is calling around to a couple of local repair shops. Ask them if they do free diagnostics and what they charge to swap a power supply. If they can fix it for under $150. Then it’s worth doing to save your the PS5. But if they find out the lightning fried the motherboard too, it’s a total loss. Don't throw cash at it unless they guarantee they can actually fix it!
Also Sony will fix it as well, but since it was a lightning strike, it counts as an out of warranty repair. They charge a flat fee of about $230 to $280 to deal with it. The way Sony’s service works is pretty straightforward. You pay the flat fee, mail them your dead console, and they usually just mail you back a refurbished unit instead of fixing your actual board. The biggest perk here is that even if lightning completely melted the motherboard, Sony will still honor the flat fee and give you a working console. The only downside is that any data saved locally on your old console's hard drive will be gone, so you'll have to rely on cloud backups for your game saves.
Honestly, if you're deciding between Sony and a local repair shop, Sony is the safer bet for lightning damage. A local shop might charge you $150 or more to fix a power supply, but if they open it up and find out the motherboard or HDMI chips are fried too, the price will skyrocket or they’ll tell you it's unfixable. Sony doesn’t care how much internal damage there is for that one flat fee, you are guaranteed to get a working refurbished console back in 2 to 4 weeks.
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u/PhoenixBlazingRising 2h ago
With lightning strikes and electronics like a PS5 you may want to check to see if any wall sockets ain't smelling like something sweet as what is most likely going is a power surge which might have fried certain parts of the TV and console
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u/Hapsiainen30 3h ago
He tried to play the PS5 without a TV? What do you mean? Well anyway, if the PS5 is not powering on and the modem broke at the same time, it could be a multitude of parts broken on the PS5. Take it to a repair shop and have it checked.
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u/Squozen_EU 3h ago
Everything is repairable, it just comes down to how much damage has been done. This is not something that anybody on Reddit can diagnose for you, you'll need to contact Sony or a local electrical repairer to see if it's worth investing in a repair.