Darn that Ben Franklin!

[Bret4207]

Well, Ben's favorite pet, "Lightning", decided to pay me a visit Saturday. The good news is some surge protectors work. The bad news is some don't. The computer and TV's made it. The phone lines and 3 electric fencers didn't. Of course with no phone line the DSL was kaput. OTH, we had no telemarketers calling.

Did you guys know it's possible to actually survive without a computer with internet access?:veryconfu

[oldhickory]

Did you guys know it's possible to actually survive without a computer with internet access?:veryconfu


Yep! Did it Saturday after I got off the tractor! Spent the rest of the afternoon on the front porch with my portable bench sizing and de-priming several hundred .223s...Rather pleasant actually.:redneck:

[405]

You weren't trying the key and kite thing were you?:mrgreen:

I get some of that here but been lucky so far. That stuff is so upredictable about the outcome. Good news it didn't hurt anyone or burn the house down- eh. Just curious, was it a direct hit or a near miss where the subductive/inductive juice bleeds over to electric lines/devices?

[oneokie]

The computer and TV's made it.
Imagine the kids weren't too upset.




and 3 electric fencers didn't.
Hard to protect those when they can get hammered from both ends.



Did you guys know it's possible to actually survive without a computer with internet access?:veryconfu
Was experiencing the same last weekend.

[Jon]

I've lost more equipment from the surge in the phone line than through anything else.

Whenever I hear of a storm coming, I unplug everything. Surge suppressors are hit or miss depending on the strike.

[Lee]

Surge protectors, up to the point of blowing out, all work well. But, they are known as a "sacrificial" device, and are degraded each time they do their job, the extent depending on the amount of overload. Then, the last time they protect, they open up, and offer no more protection. Without opening the case, it is not easy to determine if they have outlived their usefulness. So, you end up with a surge protector that doesn't look bad, doesn't smell bad, and doesn't protect anymore.
Throw away all your current protectors and buy new. If you got hit that hard, it is cheap insurance, unless you are POSITIVE yours are still working, and not stressed to near the end of their useful life.
I love summer thunderstorms! I do a bang up business replacing modems for folks!

[JeffinNZ]

Sorry to hear of the inconvenience Bret but I gotta tell you I LOVE a good electrial storm. Of course we don't get so many in my neck of the woods and they last 10 minutes usually.

When I was visiting in Alabama in '04 we took a day trip to Nashville over the state line and on the way home that night there was an electrical storm for the entire trip. I had never seen the likes.

[DLCTEX]

I have been without internet access at home since Sat evening. I use Wild Blue, off a satalite. For 16 months it worked almost flawlessly, but has been in and out a lot for the past few months. It's 12 miles into town to use this one at the office, so I hope it's back on when I get home. I can live without it, or a cell phone, but don't want to. I'd much rather have internet than Dish network.

[DLCTEX]

Jeff, you should see some of the electrical display we get here in Texas, awesome. and it can go on for hours. An oil tank batter near us was struck Friday night. Blew a thousand barrel tank almost a quarter mile and burned oil for hours. Last year an injection well site 2 miles north was struck and blew 6 tanks, quite a boom. I was surprised that they didn't install lightening protection when they built it back.

[45nut]

Did you guys know it's possible to actually survive without a computer with internet access?
Old Ben was a wise old guy, in a similar vein one of his quotes is quite appropriate here.


One knows the true value of water when the well goes dry.

[dromia]

Sorry to hear about the hit Bret, glad your all OK though.

I find that times when I have no computer can be quiet liberating as well as frustrating.

Nothing wrong in a bit of doing without.

[Buckshot]

..............Here in So. California we don't get much thunder and lightening activity. Well, in the mountains they do :-) We were on a ride in the San Gorgonio Wilderness at about 11,000 ft. A breeze came up, some heavy clouds rolled in. I think we were IN the clouds. A brilliant flash that came from everywhere with an instantaneous horrific thunderous crash. My mule Toby just about disappeared out form under me and might have, had he been able to figure out which direction to go. Rather scary. We were in tall timber, drenched with rain and you could taste the electricity in the air.

..............Buckshot

[shotman]

Jeff you need to come over here in July and spend a month in the mid west. Tornado ally

[JeffinNZ]

Jeff you need to come over here in July and spend a month in the mid west. Tornado ally

I have seen footage of it and it appears terrifying.

Now funny thing. I get home from work and sitting on the recliner with the wee girl on my knee and BOOOMMMM overhead. The loudest thunder I have ever heard. Scared the wife and dog something shocking!

[Bret4207]

You weren't trying the key and kite thing were you?:mrgreen:

I get some of that here but been lucky so far. That stuff is so upredictable about the outcome. Good news it didn't hurt anyone or burn the house down- eh. Just curious, was it a direct hit or a near miss where the subductive/inductive juice bleeds over to electric lines/devices?

The second type. We're up relatively high in ledge country. I was in the garage when in hit and I think it was only a few hundred yards away. We've had it hit the house and right next to the house before. Oddly, I have a silo that is around 90+ foot high and it never gets hit. I almost wish it would rather than the house get hit.

The thunder storms here are something. One from the west or southwest is bad enough. One from the north east.....Katie, bar the door! They beat anything I've ever seen. Maybe in tornado alley they get worse, but it's hard to imagine.

[Tom Herman]

Just curious, was it a direct hit or a near miss where the subductive/inductive juice bleeds over to electric lines/devices?

I had a 600' loop antenna back East, and storms were a real interesting time for me... The whole mess was grounded with a WWII SA-13/U B-29 bomber knife switch when not in use... I would hear these "Pffffft" noises right around the time a strike would happen some distance away. It was the sound that the induced voltage makes as the lightning strike hits my antenna and gets shorted to ground.
Come to find out, you can induce 1,000 volts per foot of exposed wire with a strike a mile away!
People have been killed hanging up laundry on a wire clothesline from induced strikes.
One of the neighbors had a dog on a chain and a wire run, and the dog would yelp every time there was a strike close by.
He finally figured out that the dog was getting zapped by the close strikes, and changed the way he kept the dog so he wouldn't get shocked any more.

Happy Shootin'! -Tom

[BD]

Lighting can be some funny stuff. Over my years of building and remodeling houses I've seen some really weird damage. And I've seen my share if it on the rivers as well.

One lightning repair I did up in Maine years ago involved repaneling one whole side of an interior sloping ceiling. Lightning had hit the electrical entrance and traveled into the panel box. Somehow this resulted in all of the nails being pulled out of the T&G pine on the opposite ceiling!

On another house we had just finished up on Wilson Pond we had a fire call from the homes alarm system just after a brief storm. The house was full of smoke and the FD came, but could find no fire. They put in a blower door and cleared out the smoke, but couldn't find anything burnt. A few hours after they left the lady of the house called again saying there was water running out of the cellar ceiling where the gas line went up to the range in the kitchen island. We pulled the range out to have a look and apparently a lightning strike near the 1,000 gallon LP tank had traveled in through the SS gas line until it arced to the ground on the back of the range. The arc had burnt a pin hole in the gas line and lit it, setting the adjacent cabinetry framing on fire which burned only long enough to melt a pinhole in the radiant tubing under the cabinets. The water from the radiant tubing then put the fire out.

I've spent a lot of time kayaking some pretty deep and narrow canyons. And over the years I've experienced "Ball Lightning" several times. This occurs when a lightning bolt comes down into the gorge and then travels horizontonally down the canyon until it grounds on some projection of the canyon wall, or a island with a tree. There's a spot in Ripogenus Gorge on the Penobscot where I've seen this happen several times with the lighting finding ground on the island called "Big Heater" which sticks up in the gorge like a 60 foot tall wood splitter wedge. The safest place to be in this paticular situation seems to be right in the middle of the river, and just keep on going as I've never seen on strike on the river bed in one of these narrow gorges. I'll tell you it's pretty darn heart stopping to have a lightning bolt travel past just a few feet over your head.

We had two guys fail to show up for a Cheat River trip one Sunday. On Monday when the campground cleared out there was one tent left. Those two guys had lain dead in that tent since a storm Saturday night when lightning hit the big sycamore tree next to them.

I met an american woman kayaking in France once named Mary Lightning. She claimed to have been struck by lightning 3 times. Demoralized by this she said she went to see an indian shaman who told her to accept lightning into her spirit. So she'd gone to court and legally change her surname and apparently hadn't been struck since.

I've got a couple more good lightnin' stories, but this is getting long winded already.
BD

[beagle]

We got some real lightning here in KY also and we sit on a high hill. Had two incidents after we moved here so I got a supressor system that protects each circuit. No further problems so far.

Florida seems to me to have the most violent electrical storms. We'd go down on military exercises and I'll tell you, it would walk around every afternoon.

Hope you don't have a repeat of that./beagle

[jsizemore]

Like my stereo guy tells me with his thumb and index finger about 1/4" apart (about the distance between the 2 legs of a MOV),"If you don't think lightning can jump that far, you are fooling yourself".

When lightning is in the area,"UNPLUG,UNPLUG,UNPLUG", the mantra of the guy still listening to his stereo afterward the storm is gone.

[Bret4207]

Anyone know exactly how a lightning rod system works?

[cajun shooter]

We have several homes here in Louisiana with them. We are in a high lightning prone area. We have lost several electrical devices over the years. Just replaced a tv and stereo system. It seems that the strip had been hit already and was not working as we thought. You want to have some fun! Come to Louisiana and go boating in the Gulf at any time between May and September. The rod system does work as I have a friend who installs them and after this last shot we might be in line for one.

[jar-wv]

I spent 19 years building towers and cellular phone sites. I have seen lots of electronic equipment fried by lightning. Many towers were located on the highest piece of property that could be found in the area. Before the storm rolled in you could feel the static charge building up on the steel. Got shocked lots of times by the static electricity. Everything and anything built around the sites was grounded, fences, shelter, tower, any generators or ice shields, everything. There was usually a large ground system which consisted of a loop of buried #2 tinned copper wire that everything was attached to. Usually there was a lightning rod located on top or tower, with a # 2/0 insulated copper wire attached and ran the length of the tower to the ground loop. For ground rods at many of the sites holes were drilled and 2" x 20' copper water pipe was used. These pipes were filled with a special chemically treated salt and surrounded with betonite clay to retain moisture. All conections were cadweld, no mechanical connections permitted. Lightning arresters were used at the power entrance and antenna line entrances. All that and they still had damaged equipment from lighning.

[BD]

I've seen a couple of lightning protection systems put in. They are all designed to provide a path to conduct the charge to earth as safely as possible. Back in the day the rods and the ground wire were on the ridge and the ground ran down from both ends on the outside of the house to two ground rods, which were also tied to the ground from the electrical service entrance. The lightning stayed outside

The last one we had installed on a project had the rods projecting up through the ridge and the ground wire ran under the ridge inside and down through the house. Along the way it is bonded to the ground of every electrical device within six feet, as well as every piece of structural steel, (columns and I-beams). in the electrical service yard it's bonded to the two house ground rods and a ground wire from the rebar poured into the foundation. The system ground is a copper loop of heavy braided wire buried completely around the house 3' deep and minimum of 5' out from the structure. There is a large surge surpressor on the service entrance panel, and 3 smaller surge protectors on the individual breaker panels. This ran about $26,000 on a 6,500 sq ft house, installed. A UL guy came and inspected the installation to secure the rating provided by the installer. When hit, the lightning comes inside and down through the house. Can't tell you if it works, but no one has called to say there's been damage.

One of the options were rods with lots of little wires radiating out from them like little copper Xmas trees. Supposedly these rods greatly decrease the chances of a strike on your house, but may increase the chances of the strike choosing your neighbors house instead. We did not select that option.

This is a decision I've been through on every high end job I've run. Some choose it and some don't. To my knowledge there is no statistical evidence either way to support it. However, I do know people who had real lightning issues in the past who installed the old style system and were happy with the performance. Cost of that DIY was about $1,500 for a 2,000 sq/ft house 10 years ago.

I do not have lightning protection on any of the houses we own, but none of them have had this problem.

BD

[Bret4207]

Thanks BD. I was wondering because the way it was explained to me the lightening rods don't actually act as a ground for lightning, but carry the surrounding electrical charge of the house itself to ground making the protected home "invisible" to lightening. I'm open to other opinions, but it never seemed right to me that some copper wire could successfully carry that many hundreds of thousands of volts and amps to ground. Any hit I've seen the wiring is blown apart and melted, along with everything else in sight.

[Down South]

I've lost more equipment from the surge in the phone line than through anything else.

That was the same thing that I was going to say. Be sure if you have a phone line connected to any appliance that it goes through a good surge protector first. My phone line is connected properly and grounded at the box outside the house but I still get surges during electrical storms. I unplug TV's and stuff too when a bad storm is coming but I can't always be here.
I’ve bought lots of surge protectors in my time. One thing about a surge protector, once it takes a surge it is usually toast. If the surge comes in through the phone line then that part of the SP is shot. SP’s, good ones are not cheap either. I buy the ones that coax, phone lines and electrical outlets are protected.
I've never had an appliance failure when protected by the more expensive SP's. All SP's are rated differently and are rated in Joules? The more Joules it’s rated for the better it is.

[Freightman]

Jeff, you should see some of the electrical display we get here in Texas, awesome. and it can go on for hours. An oil tank batter near us was struck Friday night. Blew a thousand barrel tank almost a quarter mile and burned oil for hours. Last year an injection well site 2 miles north was struck and blew 6 tanks, quite a boom. I was surprised that they didn't install lightening protection when they built it back.
Dale you forgot to mention the pie plate size hail or pie- melon size hail. and the hurricane force winds, and the best of all a class four or five tornado.
Texas Panhandle Love it or you will leave it.

[klcarroll]

........Texas Panhandle Love it or you will leave it.


Ah YES!!! .......The Panhandle! .........I have spent hundreds of productive hours chasing Severe Weather in the Panhandle!!:drinks:

Kent

[BD]

Bret,

I guess I couldn't say with authority whether these systems carry the lightening "charge" itself, or not.

Every recent one I've seen was grounded to earth as much as possible, and terminated on the top with antenna pointed skyward. They are also careful to avoid any dips or sharp bends in the wire on the run down through the house. And that's primarily what the UL guy was looking at. There's a minimum radius for a bend, and the wire is never allowed to gain elevation. the grounds for all the stuff grounded off the side along the way also have to slope down to the main wire. It's laid out kind of like like a branched drainage system, pitched down all the way to the ground loop. They spend some time thinking about whether or not to ground interior steel if it's supported by wood, and if grounded, how and wear they attach the ground and route it down.

When I was a kid, a tall white pine in our yard got struck, and split. I ran outside barefoot to check it out and got a shock that put me on my butt on the front walk as soon as my feet hit the lawn. It must have been at least two minutes after the strike, and there was still a healthy charge in the ground.

I had a good friend and business partner when I first started building who bought an "off the grid" house on 40 acres in Blanchard, Maine. The place was built on a pressure treated foundation. It had a masonry chimney up the very center of the house with a wood cook stove on one side and an airtight wood stove on the other. Against the far wall was a gas range and a gas fridge. This place was up on the ridge above the Picscatiquis river and it would get hit by lightning all the time. The wood stoves would get a sort of hissy blue glow, and then they'd arc over to the gas appliances. I only experienced this one time. I never wanted to be around there during a storm after that. That's the place that had the old style protection system added on the cheap. And it did cure that problem.

BD

[Beekeeper]

Brett,
I grew up in the panhandle of Texas no far from Dale.
Our house had the old fashioned lightning rods on it.
The small diameter wire works great.
It isn't so much high amperage as it is Extremely High Voltage ( in the Mega Volts).
The extremely high voltage hits something and causes it to swell and as it is absorbed it creates high amperage(transformer effect)

Ask someone that lives in the desert about Saint Elmo's Fire.
It is caused by a lightning strike and runs the wires until it hits a ground wire and shunts to ground.
It shure is beautiful but scary to watch

beekeeper

[crabo]

Now funny thing. I get home from work and sitting on the recliner with the wee girl on my knee and BOOOMMMM overhead. The loudest thunder I have ever heard. Scared the wife and dog something shocking!


About 15 or 20 years ago I bought a 6.5 TCU in a contender. I was loading ammo for it and wanted to shoot it really bad. I had never shot that caliber and I wanted to feel the recoil.

It was raining at the time, so I stepped out on the back porch and waited for some lightening. The lightening flashed and I counted 1, 2, 3, and I touched it off into the ground.

I sure the next door neighbor said, "damn, that was close!"