Lightning Season in Highlands County: What It Does to Your RV and How to Get Ahead of It

July 15, 2026

Florida recorded 305 lightning events per square mile in 2025, more than any other state, and over the decade from 2009 to 2018 it averaged nearly 1.2 million cloud-to-ground flashes a year, ranking first in the country. Highlands County sits in the middle of that, and from June into September the storms come most afternoons. For an RV on a resort pedestal, that is not weather trivia. It is the single most common cause of a dead converter, a blank fridge display, and an air conditioner that will not start, and it is the reason the generator you have not run since April matters.

This is what a storm does to a rig, what to check the morning after, and how to spend a small amount of money to avoid a large one.

What actually happens in a strike

A direct hit on an RV is rare. What is common, and what generates most of our July and August electrical calls, is a strike on or near a park’s electrical service: a transformer, a pole, a line, the ground near the distribution panel. The strike induces a voltage spike that runs down the park’s wiring to every pedestal on that loop at the same instant. Your shore cord carries it straight to the main panel. Nothing in a standard RV stops it.

The converter is the first casualty. It is a switching power supply sitting on the 120V line, converting shore power to 12 volts for the lights, the pump, the fans, and every control board in the rig. The spike overwhelms its input stage and it dies, sometimes with a smell, sometimes silently. The rig runs on batteries for a day or two, the batteries run down, and the owner calls about dead batteries. The batteries are fine. See batteries dead or not charging.

If the spike is big enough, or comes in on the neutral, it goes past the converter onto the 12V side and takes the boards: the rooftop AC control board, the refrigerator board, the water heater board, the furnace board. Each is a $250 to $700 part. The inverter, if you have one, is also a switching supply and also vulnerable. The lightning surge damage page lists the failure order and what each costs.

At a park with hundreds of rigs on one service, like the Okeechobee KOA with its 800 sites, a single storm produces several dead converters and a few dead boards on the same afternoon. At a fish camp on the open shore of Lake Istokpoga it is the same story on a smaller scale. The rigs with a protector on the pedestal are the ones that do not call.

The morning-after check

If a storm came through and something is wrong, fifteen minutes before you call:

1. The pedestal breaker. Go outside and look. A surge trips it, and a rig on a tripped pedestal looks like a rig with everything dead.
2. The main breaker and the GFCI inside. The GFCI outlet, usually in the bathroom or kitchen, often feeds the converter’s outlet on a chain. Reset it.
3. Converter output. With shore power confirmed on, meter the converter’s output lugs. 13.2 to 14.4 volts: it survived. Zero: it did not. Check its output fuses first; a surge blows them and the converter behind them is sometimes fine.
4. The 12V fuse panel. Pull and look. A surge that came through the converter blows several at once.
5. Make a list of what responds and what does not. AC fan runs but no compressor: board. Fridge display blank on both sources: board. Water heater will not click: board. Each is a separate line on the quote, and we test them all on one visit.
6. Smell. Burnt electronics near the converter or at the AC ceiling assembly is confirmation.

Call the day after, not the week after, because a dead converter turns into a dead battery bank in two days, and now it is two problems.

The $300 that saves the $2,000

An EMS-style surge protector goes between the pedestal and the shore cord. It clamps voltage spikes before they reach the rig, and the good ones also cut power on low voltage, open ground, and reversed polarity. Low-voltage cutoff matters on its own in this county: a 30-amp fish-camp pedestal sagging into the low 100s on a hot afternoon, when every rig on the loop is running AC, is what kills compressors and start capacitors, and the protector shuts the rig off before that happens. Open ground and reversed polarity are common on older pedestals and are a shock hazard, not just an equipment one.

A basic power strip inside the rig does almost nothing against a pedestal surge, because the converter, which is what the surge kills, is upstream of it.

Two more cheap habits: unplug the shore cord when a big storm is forecast and you are leaving the rig for the day, and keep the converter’s output fuses in the rig’s spares, because a fuse is the cheapest thing a surge can blow.

Hurricane season is generator season

The afternoon storms are the everyday version. The big version is a tropical system, and Highlands County has had two in recent memory that took the power out almost countywide. Hurricane Irma in September 2017 left 90 percent of the county without power at its peak and made Highlands the second-hardest-hit county in Florida after the Keys, with more than 13,000 homes affected. Hurricane Ian on the evening of September 28, 2022 brought gusts of 66 mph at Lake Placid, 69 at Avon Park Air Force Range, and 72 at Venus, dropped four to six inches of rain, and left the county with a near-total outage for at least 24 hours, most of it restored by the following Sunday.

Both times, the rigs that stayed cool with a working fridge were the ones whose generator started. The rigs whose generator had sat since April with ethanol fuel in the carburetor bowl, in a compartment that ran well over 100 degrees all summer, were the ones we heard from afterward. Varnished jets, a corroded bowl, a unit that cranks and will not fire. The Onan page explains the mechanism; the fix is a carburetor clean or rebuild at $350 to $800, and it is far better done in May than during the outage.

The readiness list is short: run the generator two hours a month under load through the summer, get it serviced before June (oil, filters, plugs, fuel system, load test), keep fresh fuel in it or run the bowl dry when it sits, and check that the CO alarm works and has not expired, because a generator running through a long night next to a closed-up rig is exactly when that alarm matters.

Documenting a claim

Lightning damage is usually a covered peril, but the adjuster wants proof the failure was electrical and sudden, and most of the damage is invisible. What makes a claim go through is a tech’s written findings: meter readings at the converter and each board, photos, the list of what failed and what survived, and the date of the storm. We write that up as part of the visit. The pricing page covers how the written estimate works.

The bottom line

Put a real surge protector on the pedestal before June. Run the generator monthly. Get it serviced before hurricane season. Meter the converter the morning after any big storm, and call before the batteries run down. None of that is expensive, and all of it is cheaper than the alternative in the most lightning-dense state in the country.