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Lightning Protection Systems
There have been several threads on this topic in the past but given the recent house destroyed by lightning over in Amelia i thought we should discuss this again.
I moved here to the Villages a year ago and immediately had the SECO surge protector installed at my meter. I also have surge protectors and UPS systems procecting my computers and other electronic equipment. All these protectors do is shunt electrical surges coming through the electrical feed to your home. These surges can come directly from the power source but they usually can happen when lightning strikes close by and jumps to your electrical. Never buy the SECO surge protector for the insurance since they will only pay if the damaging surge came through the electrical and through their surge protector and the protector failed. All this surge protector does is "lessen" the magnititude of the surge so you point surge protectors at your computers and other electrical equipment can stop the surge. Other more common sources are through your cable, phone, irregation and other systems. The most common is through the cable line. There is a surge protector that can be installed at your panel in the garage just for the cable but i don't think may have this. I then decided to have a Lightning Protection System (LPS) installed. Why? Because although there are very few homes destroyed by lightning here in the Villages you never know when you could hit the lottery and be hit. When lightning hits your house or hits close and jumps to your house it will enter the attic and run around like a ricocheting bullet trying to find ground. It could hit your gas line then jump to an electrical line then even through people in the house causing death. All the LPS system does is provide a safe path to ground outside your home avoiding the destruction. The fact that most people miss is although you home is insured, lightning can enter the living space and kill you. Rare but it does happen. So just saying you have home insurance is not the ansewer. If you do decide to get an LPS, Triangle and A1 are local UL certified installers. Both are excellent and their prices are close enough. All this said, after having a system installed recently you need to be aware of the following: 1) Although these companies try to hide the wiring as much as possible on the roof, you will be able to see the wires when you look for them. 2) A lot of screw holes will be needed to fasten the equipment to the roof. These companies use special screws but ask for sealant to be applied to lessen the risk of a leak down the road. 3) If you are just building, you can have all the wires installed in the attic so you don't see any wires but this is considerably more expensive and i'm not convinced i would want the lightning discharge system inside my home, just in case. 4) Lighter and red/orange/brown colored roofs will hide the wires better than other colored roofs. For very light roofs you can install aluminum wire instead of copper and it's hard to see. (copper is better btw.) 5) Eventually when you need a new roof, you need to call the LPS installer to uninstall the roofing equipment, have the new roof installed then have the LPS installer re-install the system on the roof. It's not crazy expensive since the whole system doesn't need to be removed and if you had copper installed, they will re-use it. For those who had LPS systems installed did anyone ever have a leak from the screw holes in the roof? Since the loading from the LPS system is small, not like a dish antenna or solar panels my guess is the screws rarely leak. Hope this all helps. |
The original owner of our home installed a system by A-1 in 2020. We just re-roofed. Never a leaking problem. As part of the reroofing process we had A-1 remove the system, store it and reinstall it; all at a very reasonable cost. It appears to me that all attachment devices had/have a liberal application of a sealant material. The roofers replaced only a 3'x 4' area of damaged sheathing on our 2400 sq ft home and that was nowhere near any lightning rod system penetration.
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What’s a ballpark figure for one of these systems?
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Seems like you would need some pretty heavy gauge wire to bypass 30,000 amps from a lightning strike to ground.
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What if your immediate neighbor has the system? Doesn’t lightning hit the highest point or is the goal of the system to have the ground connected to your house?
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As far as the voltage and amperage from the strike, you are correct. First it's very short and Triangle installed 4 ground wires one at each corner of the house. Three are required by code. The whole grounding system is all connected so the charge would run down all 4 ground wires. In addition, the system is then bonded to the utility ground where there is an additional 5th ground rod that came with the house. |
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The goal is to provide a safe path to ground if lightning hits your house vs it going into the attic, ricocheting like a bullet around your house and maybe killing an occupant. To make matters worse, lightning can go into your attic, jump to an electrical wire, burn it up then travel down that wire to another circuit, damage that one, etc, until it finds a path to ground. In a case like this you would potentially need to rip your walls open to find the damaged electrical wiring and re-wire. At the end of the day for $2K to install an LPS it's not worth gambling. If you do get hit you are in for a lot of work whether insurance pays. Look at it as one time insurance. |
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We have a whole house Seco surge protector and individual surge protectors on computers and other expensive devices and wondering if we should take it a step further. |
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My suggestion is give Bobby at Triangle a call and he can give you a quote and answer any questions since he's one of the experts. 352-483-7020 I got mine installed on Friday not even knowing the recent strike in Amelia. Some of my neighbors here on Deskin Ln also have systems. |
I worked in the electric utility field, there is a 'shield' effect from the highest point, think of a cone about 30 degrees wide from the highest point to the ground. The area under this cone tends to be shielded from a direct strike. This is why you see ONE overhead ground wire on many electric utility high voltage lines, this wire protects the wires below. A neighbor's house would NOT be high enough to protect your house, however, the very pointed rods may attract the lightning to that location. We actually used devices that resembled large fuzzy balls at some locations to dissipate the charge and avoid a direct strike, NO idea if these actually worked.
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Wondering ... if I have metal solar panels on my metal roof, and they are properly grounded, am I good ? Is this virtually as good as the LPS talked about in this thread earlier ?
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Also have tall pine trees within 30 feet of house. They are known to be 'lightning rods' due to their root system. Does that offer some protection to the house ?
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https://inspectapedia.com/lightning/...llation-UL.pdf |
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Without a LPS, Wiring and metallic gas lines are susceptible to a strike. |
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Instrumented commercial high high risk sites record multiple strikes with no damage. Check out NASA for extream examples. |
Lps
We had LPS installed in early 2012. We have not had a leak and have had the system inspected twice over the last 10 years (about every 5 yrs). Both times we were told our house had been hit by lightning because of the damage to one of the rods. We had no clue this happened. Last summer the house across the street from us was struck & caused a fire, but was quickly brought under control by the VPSD. Still the damage was in the 10's of thousands of dollars. Since that time, at least 5 other neighbors had LPS installed.
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If you attend you will get all the facts on the topic then you can make your own decision whether you get a system or not. If you go on Youtube and search for LPS you will see lots of hard facts on the topic and that they do indeed work. |
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We had our system installed primarily because our home has natural gas. This is not distributed throughout the house with, say, the black pipe that we knew up north but rather by a material far more flimsy (for lack of a better word but meaning essentially the same. And of course gas is distributed through the attic and then dropped down the walls to range, water heater, furnace, and clothes dryer. Without LPS I'd have little to no confidence in the gas piping permitted here in TV. |
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Just to add, LPS systems do not attract or repel lightning. All they do is provide a safe path to ground for the discharge if you home gets hit vs the lightning running around your house destroying everthing when trying to discharge to ground. Also as far as lightning rods are concerned, Triangle and A1 will do a grounding test to measure the ground of the lightning rods they install. Make sure you ask for the report. Also the system is bonded to the utility ground And the ground rod that was installed when your house was built. So in my case i'm grounded to 5 ground rods plus the utility ground. |
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Does the LPS protect the the gas lines in the attic? Lightening struck a neighbors home, arked and split our gas line in the attic. We were fortunate and were able to have it mitigated right away, but troubling nevertheless.
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Lightning Protection Discussion
Wow. Great discussion on LPS. TOV at its best. Thank you all posters. FYI, I have SECO installed surge protector on my meter, excellent surge protector electrical outlets installed on my electrical circuits feeding major appliances, and a roof mounted LPS installed by A-1 Lightning. Danny (owner/installer) apparently has done thousands of TV properties, many industrial sites, and knows his craft. I learned a lot from asking him a lot of Qs; many of his answers confirmed in this discussion. Taking the above steps seemed logical considering TV is a “lightning capital” of the U.S. Good luck to all in your decision making process.
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I would think they would have to attract lightning, since you are effectively raising the ground potential up over the roof.
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I don't see any talk about the static discharge or drain that provide some protection from lightning. Just keeping ground mounted components from building up a static charge -- helps.
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My understanding is: The lightning rod is not intended to attract the lightening bolt, but to attract the charged ions in the air around the house during an electrical storm. the lightening bolt follows the richest path of charged ions to the earth. Since your house is surrounded by relatively ion-free air, lightening bolts go elsewhere.
I did the math on the probability of being struck by lightening. I took the total number of lightening induced house fires among all the houses in TV. I don't remember the calculated probability, but it was something like my house would be struck, on average, every 400 years. (Maybe it was more, I don't remember.) Of those numbers, few people are killed, and all of the houses have fire insurance. My calculations led me to conclude that lightening rods were an expensive insurance for an extremely unlikely event. Now, every person has a different tolerance for risk, but for me, there were many more likely catastrophes I should insure against first. |
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The damage: In addition to the roof damage our entire land-line phone system was destroyed - all the wiring was literally fried beyond repair and the phone units as well. All plugged in electronic devices were toast beyond repair - small radios, clocks, microwave, the computers and my beloved HiFi. We had a in-ground 900 foot "Invisible" dog fence. The fence control unit was blown across the garage (25 feet). Interestingly, at about every 50 feet of the buried perimeter wire was a 4 inch crater with a broken wire at the bottom. It even blew out a smaller crater in the concrete driveway where the wire crossed. There was even a 18 inch charred streak across a wall-to-wall carpet from a floor lamp to a forced-air register. The washer, dryer, stove, furnace and AC unit were not affected. My neighbors' computers on both sides were toast. One of these homes had lightning rod protection. Neither had surge protectors. Home owners insurance (Allstate) took care of everything post haste although we received a pro rata allowance on replacing the charred carpet and HiFi due to their age. The surge protectors were worthless for a direct lightning strike as would a whole-house surge protector as I now understand these devices. As regarding the SECO units I urge you to read the warnings and limitations part of deal - eye opening. |
The official data on lightning strikes in TV is useful; the unofficial, directly observable (not hearsay) and perhaps unreported data on TV lightning strikes also is instructive. E.g., my neighbor across the street has had two lightning strikes, one causing major damage, a house down the street from mine was struck resulting in a total loss and a rebuild, a house on a nearby street also was recently struck. We live on higher ground; perhaps a reason for a lot of lightning activity, or simply bad luck. Lightning — one of nature’s greatest free shows. I’ve personally been within 50 yards of lightning strikes. That sealed the deal for me. Scary and fascinating.
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