The Gods are Bowling

Something I’ve asked friends about but never gotten a satisfactory explanation.
With all the lightening around Lakeside – thousands of strikes in an evening – how come one never hears about property damage, deaths and injuries????
Some of the strikes last night (judging by the delay of the thunder claps) must have been only a few hundred yards from our house in upper Chula Vista.

SunFan

Good question! I've never heard of anyone being hit or houses burning but I do know people who have had an apparent strike and lost all their electronics. This is the time of year to pull the plugs when you hear thunder, especially the computers.

Or have whole house surge protection.

SunFan

But, and I may be wrong about this, it's been explained to me by old-timers here that if the house or the pole or transformer takes a direct hit - and your equipment is plugged in - the hit can follow the electrical path and fry anything that is distally connected. It's not about surges. I unplug.

Just install a lightening rod if you are concerned about your house getting struck. Cheap and easy to do.

I know someone who had a whole house surge protection and the house was hit by lightning - in West Ajijic. Fried every electronic device in the home. This was several years ago. I go around unplugging things in a really bad storm.

That one big crack last night I could of swore it hit my back yard when I was in bed, me and kitty came off the bed it was so loud, scared the begibbies out of me.

Jajaja......yeah there was a couple of loud ones last night.

simpsca wrote:I know someone who had a whole house surge protection and the house was hit by lightning - in West Ajijic. Fried every electronic device in the home. This was several years ago. I go around unplugging things in a really bad storm.

Whole house surge protection and Lightning protection are two different things. It would take a very very large surge protector to deal with a direct
lightning strike. The way a conventional surge protector works is to burn up things called MOVs. The more MOVs the higher the rating in Joules which
should be above 500. A direct lightning strike would not be satisfied with blowing up a bunch of MOVs. You would need to use a different method to
deal with lightning. Better to make the lightning go to a wire and into a ground network and keep lightning away from the house wiring. Those short
pointy things on the top of barns in the Midwest take the lightning energy and send it to a wire which goes down the side of the barn and into a separate
ground network nowhere near any of your house wiring or ground. I do not know what method whole house surge protectors use but getting one that
can deal with a lightning strike it would have to be pretty expensive I would guess.

you need a ten foot solid copper pole, driven 9.5 feet into the ground, the pole must be at least 3/4/ inch in diameter. then you connect your house ground cable to it.

Now isn't it easier and more cost effective to simply pull a few power bar plugs for the duration?

What if you are not home?

gvprod wrote:you need a ten foot solid copper pole, driven 9.5 feet into the ground, the pole must be at least 3/4/ inch in diameter. then you connect your house ground cable to it.

Lightning and house grounds should be separate. In this instance it is good to have two separate grounds. If you get hit by lightning it can
even pull up glued tiles off a concrete floor as it did in my families house. It took out stuff that was not even plugged to AC. The cable or
phone connections can be the travel points for lightning. Do not allow any house, cable, or phone grounds to be connected to lightning
ground or you could get a 60HZ buzz in all your electronics. It is caused by having two separate grounds.

Z

CanuckBob wrote:What if you are not home?

We mostly have thunder and lightning storms at night during the rainy season. When I go out of town, I pull all plugs which will protect against CFE surges and lightning strikes. If I'm just out of the house during a storm, I usually only pull the electronics. It's a habit I got into living in the tropics, not a big deal and 100% effective.