Quote:
Originally Posted by Jameson
What evidence is there to prove or disprove if they work? Often there is a storm in the middle of the night (last night for instance) when I woke up hearing a loud crack of lightning very close. Apparently no homes burned down, no sirens. Quite a few of the homes in my area do have lightning systems so maybe one was stuck but the system worked. Unless there is a witness to a direct strike how do we really know? I imagine over the years at least a few people in TV must have witnessed one of these events.
|
You are absolutely correct. When lightning strikes anything, home, tree, ground, etc, meaning cloud to ground strike, we always hear a loud bang depending on how close it is to our house. But if it hits an object we usually see a fire and that tells us what happened. On the other hand if your home had a LPS for example, and lightning hit and was safely shunted to ground, unless you were actually standing outside your house at that moment, you would not know what actually happened. The Villages Lightning Study Group has I believe 16 documented cases of homes that the owners believed were hit by lightning. From one we have the damaged lightning rod, and in the others there was some evidence of the grounding cable getting hot and scortching a bush branch touching the wire.