I did an archive search but couldn’t find anything. So I suppose I’m the first to ever think of this question
As I woke up this morning, a huge thunder storm was underway over Amsterdam. Lithning bolts flashed through the sky repeatedly. Thinking nothing of it (other than “Hmm, looks like I’m gonna take the bus”), I got into the shower.
After a few minutes a thought hit me. Could I be taking a risk showering whilst a thunderstorm was raging over my house?
Now, I know that most houses have lightning conductors that guide a possible lightning strike into the ground. But for some reason, that doesn’t stop peoples TV’s from blowing up, as happened to a friend of mine just last week. So apparently, the lightning can get into the house through the ground, by means of the cable and/or electricity wiring. If it can be conducted by wiring, it can also be conducted by (oldfashioned) plumbing, right? And if it hits the shower head, water is a great conductor as well. Hence: fried Clog Boy!
Is there a fault in my logic, or does showering in a thunderstorm pose an extra risk? And if so, how high is that risk?
Unless you have exposed water piping on the roof, that leads to the shower, there is no easy way for a lightning strike to get to you in the shower. Even if you attach a lightning rod to water piping on the roof, you “should” be OK. The current will head to ground and the metal pipe will conduct a lot better than water, so it “should” follow the pipe to ground. Just don’t be adjusting the water knobs or the showerhead.
TV’s blow up when lightning hits the antenna and the current heads to ground through the TV.
The major risk of electric shocks damaging both you and your elctrical gear during a thunderstorm arises from either direct hits on the power grid near your location, or a near miss that causes induction. Either way, you get a line spike that ranges from fry-your-computer to fry-your-brain.
This is why some installations use power conditioners to ensure that what supplies their delicate equipment is always a nice clean sine wave, at a constant voltage.
A major example of naturally caused induction is the famous episode where a portion of the Canadian power grid was knocked by sunspot activity 150 million kilometers away. While a thunderstorm is not in the same class as a sunspot, it is an awful lot closer, and still has an awesome amount of energy.
Also, I’m pretty sure that in a shower, there’s not really a continuous stream of water, but rather a whole bunch of little droplets. A lightning strike could conceivably arc from drop to drop, but it’d probably still have to get through a foot or two of air.
If you are thinking the lightning can go into the ground, hit a buried water pipe and come at you through the plubming, that won’t happen. Unless the ground is unusually dry to a great depth, the soil conducts and dissipates the lightning once it’s in the ground.
However, water is indeed a good conductor. When you are standing in the shower, your feet are in contact with the water which flows through the drain into the ground, so there is a very low resistance path from your body to the ground. If lightning happens to hit your house right above the bathroom, it is very possible that it will jump at you and flow through your body rather than flowing through the wall. So I’d say being in the shower is marginally more dangerous than not being in the shower.
Still, unlike the TV which can be damaged by a lightning hit somewhere else on the power grid, the shower is dangerous only if your house was directly hit. If you have lightning rods and/or tall trees anywhere near your house, I think that’s pretty unlikely.
Water is not a particularly good conductor in the scheme of things, the purer it is the less well it conducts.
People are poorer conductors than water but what water does is to increase the contact area between human and cureent carrying conductor.
To answer the OP, if the strike was very close, like in the roof, there is the possibility of shock but it would probably be not fatal as most of the energy would be dispersed to earth through pipework and even if you were stunned you would not be lokely to drown in a shower.
Many people are killed by the reaction to recieving a shock rather than the shock itself, such as falling off a ladder etc.
Anyway I always thought that Holland was so flat and low that strikes diverted themselves to France where they have to wait in a holding pattern.
nod I was taught that water is a conductor, but not a very good one (if I recall correctly). What I was taught is that although you don’t want to risk being in water and mixing it with electricity, the reason you are warned against swimming during storms is that salt water is a much better conductor. I think the combo of the shower being all broken up into droplets and just being pure water should make it fairly safe, but then again cost-benefit analysis, why risk it?
I’ll relate an incident that happened to my mother. She was working in the milkhouse with her hands under the water when a lightening strike happened about 60 yards away in some tall trees that border both my house and the barn. Knocked her flat on her butt. Now the water system is set up such that the same pump distributes water to my parents house, the barn, my house and an old line runs from my house under those large trees to a spot where there used to be a trailer. Whether it followed the water or the water pipe it had somehow traveled from the pipe under the trees to my house to the barn to knock her flat. Granted we’re talking a full stream of water with a faucet and not with a shower, but do you really want to take the chance of getting electrocuted in the shower. Yeah, he was a nice guy. Shame about him being found dead in the shower. At least it was a nice clean end.
One thing you can count on about lightening is, you can never tell what it will do. Maybe pissing in the shower during a lightening storm wouldn’t be the safest thing to do, given the choice of waiting. Hmmm, I’m trying to remember who posted something about peeing on an electric fence in the Dutch countryside.
later, Tom
where they have to wait in a holding pattern.