So during dinner last night, there was a loud thunderstorm going on outside. The sort with very bright lightning and “whoops, need new undies” thunder.
The kids were getting scared.
We assured them that we were perfectly safe inside the house.
Then Typo Knig made the statement that “besides, houses have lightning rods”.
I had a hard time believing it, and asked him where ours was. He said he thought they were required to. I suggested that while the house might be grounded, to some extent - by the plumbing at least - there was no built-in lightning rod. Certainly there is no structure visible on our roof - or anywhere else nearby - that would seem to serve this purpose.
And there we left it. The kids became more interested in dessert than in lightning so the subject was dropped.
So - how safe are houses in a lightning storm? I know I’ve heard about lightning strikes causing fires! Admittedly, I’ve never heard of anyone being electrocuted inside the house, when a strike occurs (though Mythbusters seemed to suggest it was possible if you were in contact with plumbing). Is there likely to be some sort of non-obvious lightning rod-like thing?
FTR - the house was built in the mid 1990s, so it’s not an issue of an ancient farmhouse not up to current code.
Your house is electrically grounded. Go look outside near your electrical service box. There should be a copper rod driven into the ground there and a bond wire from from the box attached to it. Doesn’t help a lightning strike though.
While a raised, conductive material that runs into the ground can certainly intercept and lead electricity along a desired course, most probably you need a greater height and mass of metal to successfully grab and divert a lightning strike.
You can definitely see if you have a lightening rod protection system on your buildings. The farms around here often had them. I’ve never seen a system installed in decades. There will be rods mounted on insulator material with a thick cable running from each one to the next, with the large cable running down the outside of the house and then connected to a grounding rod. They will be mounted at the highest points of the building.
Current code all parts of the electrical system and various metal parts of the construction are required to have grounding protection. So things like copper pipes steel beams and black steel gas pipes will be grounded. This is by no means lightning protection.
Lightning protection is only added to homes the have a higher probability of lightning strikes such as homes in large fields or on the top of hills. Lightning protection usualy consists of providing a more attractive target like a lightning rod with conductors(hopefully) capable of conducting the lighting to earth safely.
Lighting can hit homes and start fires or do significant damage. In my business(wells and water pumps) I infrequently deal with homes that have been hit by lightning or the well has been struck. Lighting hitting the well has been more common then the home. In these cases the lightnings path through the homes wiring can be erratic, damaging some things but not others. I’ve been to a few where every appliance in the home has been fried, some where the pump motor in the well has been blown apart, and others where it only left a burn mark around the well. I’ve never been to a lightning strike cite where someone has been injured or a fire has started.
Not trying to be a dick, but why do so many people insist that it’s spelled “lightening”? I’ve been noticing this a lot lately, including in a research paper written by a student who surely has heard of spell check and yet decided that whatever the word processor suggested as the correct spelling just had to be wrong.
On reading the last post i looked up at my spelling and realized I misspelled multiple times not caught by my spellchecker. As lighting is indeed a word as well. just replace all instances of lighting with lightning and it might make more sense.
As for me I always mess up spellings and use the wrong homophone. You can’t read my stuff without the spell checker being used. I try but that’s about all I can do besides live with what I can manage now.
As an extension of this… if one is doing work for a certain housing-related federal agency, one should perhaps remove the word “pubic” from one’s computer’s spellcheck dictionary. It is unlikely that the client has any real wish to discuss pubic housing.
(true story, though a colleague’s rather than my own. It was, fortunately, caught in time before the document was sent to the client).
Oh, lawd. We used to live way out in the country, and we had a well and an electric gate. The gate got hit maybe once every two or three months, which my dad could usually fix (since he built the gate) but we bought a lot of garage door opener motors. Once every two or three years the pump would get hit and life would suck balls for a while until somebody made it out to replace the thing.
Nobody ever got hurt, no fires started, but nothing electrical outside was safe.
I think you’re talking about something different. While it may be true that ground wires are not run to your outlets and certain electrical fixtures, I can virtually guarantee that your house wiring is electrically referenced to earth ground. Your neutral line connects to the center tap on the step-down transformer. Your neutral line is also connected to earth ground, probably through a 4-foot copper rod pounded into the earth somewhere near the service entrance.
For many of us who grew up way out in the country, we needed a high TV antenna tower to get more than 1 TV station. That also works pretty well as a lightning rod – higher than the house, all metal, and securely grounded.
Well. Horses are grounded too, through the horseshoes and nails. According to the instructor my last electrical safety course there have been cases of horses being killed by transformers leaking to ground. The step potential was greater for the horse because of the animal’s size and the grounding through the horseshoes. Apparently some horses were killed in Central Park this way by a transformer with a ground fault.