BobDavid:
Wow, I am finally glad to hear this explained! (I live in Arkansas and we are #3 on the list of worst lightning states - turns out the ranking has a lot to do with the number of gold courses.) We get hit many times a year by lightning that often hits within feet of our cabin and fries electronics - even some that are BATTERY POWERED! People look at us like we are crazy. The natural reply from everyone is "get a surge protector" and you will be fine, or their insurance will cover you. As you note this is simply not true in these types of cases. And even if the jolt does come through the lines you may find that the insurance coverage defaults to your homeowner's policy first, and the deductible that goes with it. In more than ten years of dealing with this I've never been able to get a cent out of the surge protector companies, even though I've had 40-50 items that were plugged into surge protectors and/or UPC that were taken out of commission by lightning strikes.
I have found that many times the only part of the item that is destroyed is the power supply - the rest of the unit is fine. This is especially true of items that have the "brick" type of power connection - something in that brick is easily destroyed, but it is also easily replaced and is something to try first (although not the case with your printers).
One really bad episode did not have anything to do with lightning. We had a series of power surges that lasted for an entire day - the lights would go really dim and then they would spike and be many times brighter than normal, then get very dim again. I finally disconnected from the grid and called the power company. Turns out we had more than a dozen electric items destroyed, including three different stereo systems. We had been renting a special "whole house" surge protector from the power company for $6 a month for several years (they installed it inside our home in the breaker box), which obviously did not do a thing for this actual surge issue. The power company found and repaired a loose ground wire at the meter on the power pole, then removed the surge protector inside our house and sent it into the company who made it - they claimed the surge did not come through their unit and therefore they were not liable for the destruction - even though the power company found and fixed the issue on the other side of the unit! Homeowner's insurance wanted us to get an estimate of repairs before they would look at the claim (after the $1,000 deduct) - something that would have cost hundreds of bucks up front (ever tried to get an estimate to repair a stereo system that you bought mail order?).
By the way, as Brad noted we've actually had much more damage done by surges coming in through the phone lines than through power lines, so if you do have surge protectors be sure to plug your phone and network lines in through them too - they still won't work very well, but at least you might sleep better!
Here is an example of a phone line issue. I got 1000' of the special underground phone line wire from the phone company and buried it between our cabin and a warehouse building out in the woods where I store my picture books. One bolt of lightning hit a tall tree near that building, ran down the tree and into the roots, then underground to the buried phone cable - blasting out a ten foot long by two feet wide by two feet deep trench in the process. When it hit the phone cable it turned and followed the cable into the warehouse and blew the phone outlet into the room, nearly setting the building on fire (it melted everything around the outlet).
