Here a while ago, I was taking a bath, not knowing a thunderstorm was moving in. The overhead ceiling light was off and the medicine cabinet light was on. A bolt of lightning hit very, very close to the house (needless to say, I jumped out of the tub mighty fast). When the lightning hit, I noticed that the overhead light lit up for just a moment.
Now my question is, if the light switch was off, how could power (even a lightning induced power surge) go through the circuit and light up the bulb?
It is possible for electricity to travel through air (after all, that’s what lightning does all the time), although under normal load, air is a sufficiently poor conductor that most switches rely on breaking the connection between two conductors to stop the flow of electricity in the circuit.
However, given a sufficiently strong surge of lightning, it would be possible for the current to “jump the gap” of the switch and cause the light to go on.
With this much power going through your lines, I would be surprised if there were not some damage to the wiring, switches, circuit breakers, etc. in your house. You might want to get it checked out by a qualified electrician to make sure you’re not living in a firetrap.
All a light switch does is create a gap in the circuit, so the electricity doesn’t flow through normally. But a strong enough charge can jump the gap. Lightning is a form that can jump a mile or more gap of air from the earth to the sky, so the quarter inch gap in your light switch is no proplem at all.
If the lightning had jumped the switch gap, most likely it would of caused some major problems, the least of which would of been burning up the switch. Most likely you had an electrical impulse on your circuit, similar to a transformer.
A large electrical field will light a Fluorescent bulb - have you ever seen the pictures of people holding them up while standing under high tension power lines.
If it was a fluorescent bulb, this is probably the reason, but if it was a normal filament bulb, could it just have been the flash reflected in the glass?
No, it was unquestionably the bulb lighting up. No reflections. I just happened to be looking right at it when it lit up. This happened a while ago, and there have been no problems with the switch or wiring since then.
Is it possible for this to happen if the wiring of the house (in perticular, the bathroom) was done improperly? I know there are many ways to hook up a light and switch, but only one way to do it right.
While true, it’s important to not that lightning isn’t an all-or-none phenomenon. A lightning strike nearby certainly has the potential to induce fairly high voltages in nearby conductors, which maybe have cause what the OP witnessed.