Whole house surge protector?

Is there some way to protect a house from lightning strikes? We got whacked last week & have a lot of damaged electronic goodies. I don't want to go through this again! It struck my 10 ft satellite dish & came into the house & got into the mains panel. From there it went to every circuit in the house. I have 2 GFI circuits in the house and they both tripped and nothing on those circuits was damaged. That's why I asked about something that could cover the entire house.

Thanks

Reply to
Patch
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do you have a unified ground? everything should be grounded at the same place. including the satellite dish.

Reply to
joe

Your house should be protected from lightning strikes and this has nothing to do with surges. Is your satellite grounded? I don't know the codes but I am almost positive it should be. Everything outside of my house is grounded, and even on my last house which was build in

1920s. That way it would have never entered your house. There is NO protection from a direct lightning strike. That the GFCIs tripped was probably from noise due to the hit, but not likely a real hit. In fact you probably got a sympathetic stroke anyway, a direct hit would have blown some 8hit up. Including yourself.

How do you know where the stroke came in and how it travelled? Lightning just wants to get to earth, surprising it would get to the main box, then go back into the house again.

Anyway, that dish should probably have a ground line on it. Tying to ground outside of the house.

Reply to
CL (dnoyeB) Gilbert

A whole house surge protector is an excellent idea, but it sounds like it wouldn't have helped in this case. The surge protector will protect against most lightening induced surges on the incoming AC, but if it enters the house elsewhere, it won't stop it. Like others have suggested, I'd check the grounding/installation of the dish.

Reply to
trader4

Protection from lightning comes in at least two flavors. One is the physical damage including fire from a direct strike. For that see your local lightning rod company. That is not a do it yourself job.

As for wiring, I suggest that you start by replacing the GFI, they may have given their all in the effort. As Joe noted, make sure your home grounds are are properly designed installed and have not been damaged. Note: a lightning strike can damage wiring so that it could cause a fire or other problems later. I would contact my insurance company and they may suggest and supply or pay for a professional inspection and repair.

I would suggest adding whole house surge protection. I have it on my home. If you feel comfortable with replacing or adding a circuit breaker, you may be ready to DIY. However if opening up the circuit breaker box makes you a little uneasy and you don't know what you are looking at in there, I suggest having them installed professionally.

As for personal experience; I had a lightning strike about 18" away from my A/C compressor unit. It blew out part of the controller circuit board, but did no damage in the house. I was able to re-wire the board eliminating the damaged section as that function was duplicated by my thermostat.

Good Luck

Reply to
Joseph Meehan

Hi, Poor grounding for the whole house including the dish? If you get a direct hit like that nothing much can help it. Tony

Reply to
Tony Hwang

Reply to
Rob Mills

Joe put his finger on the most common problem. Be sure you have a good grounding elerctrode system and that EVERYTHING is bonded to that system, preferably to a single point. Most "surge" damage is actually a transient voltage that is reconciling a grounding difference between isoilated electrodes through your equipment. Once you have a good single point grounding system, be sure all of your protectors connect there (cable, phone, satellite and power) The second layer of protection is a panel mounted protector, along with protection on the other inputs grounded to the system and the final layer is point of use protectors that incorporate all the inputs to a piece of equipment. It doesn't hurt to clip ferrite beads to the signal cables to attack the leading edge of common mode transients. We developed this strategy in SW Flortida for computer systems that never get turned off and we were quite successful, in spite of almost daily thunderstorms for most of the year.

Reply to
gfretwell

Lots of replies imply that grounding will handle a lightning strike, especially mentioned is grounding the satellite dish.

You need to understand that grounding a dish, or almost anything else, does nothing to mitigate a lightning strike. If you're struck, you're toast. No piddly #12 wire is going to handle 50,000 amps at (up to) millions of volts.

What these ground rods do - also lightning rods - is act as a preventative to lightning by discharging the positive earth charges into the surrounding atmosphere - an invisible shield around the device - satellite dish or lightning rod. This shield, however, can be penetrated by a sufficiently large lighting bolt.

So, then, get a lighting rod up (or more than one) and individually protect each critical device plugged into the mains.

Good luck.

PS If you live in a mobile home, nothing helps. Mobile homes attract tornados, lighting, and stray dogs.

Reply to
HeyBub

The telco has overhead wires everywhere in town connected to a $multi-million switching computer. So the telco must be down for about 1 week every year replacing their computer? Not likely. Direct strikes are easily earthed without damage.

If that 12 AWG (typically used for 20 amp service) was carrying 50,000 amps continuous, then that wire would be vaporized. Well that wire can carry up to 300 amps continuous. Note the word 'continuous'. That wire can carry hundreds of thousands of amps IF the current is very short. Notice how current capacity changes when we change the period. What is the typical lightning strike? Most are less than 20,000 amps. And these transients are so short (microseconds) as to not damage that 12 AWG wire.

How many amps can a 24 AWG wire carry? Well that MOV with

24 AWG wire leads is rated to carry something on the order of 5,000 amps. Furthermore, the wire is not vaporized by those 5,000 amps. The attached MOV (not its wire leads) fail if current significantly exceed 5,000 amps. 5,000+ amps on a 24 AWG wire? Not a problem because we add an additional fact - time of the 5,000+ amps. Time is so short that those leads easily handle a quick 5000+ amps.

Also incorrect (a product of the urban myth machine) is that lightning rods discharge the air. Somehow a lightning rod will discharge "the positive earth charges into the surrounding atmosphere"? One small problem. Charges that create lightning are located miles away in the cloud and often miles away elsewhere on the earth. Lightning is electricity - not electrostatic charges. Lightning connects charges in that cloud to other, distant, and earth borne charges. Tell us that a lightning rod will somehow discharge a cloud that is miles away? This is the myth promoted by ESE industry.

Early Streamer Emission industry claim their devices discharge the atmosphere. But ESE manufacturers never provide science reason nor experimental evidence for their myths. Myths? Without both theory and experimental evidence, then a fact does not exist. The ESE industry provides neither.

The ESE industry tried to create NFPA 781 standard. When rejected, they attempted to get the well respected NFPA 780 standard eliminated. The ESE industry were even accused of blackmail - sue the non-profit NFPA into bankruptcy - to get their scam product approved.

How foolish is this idea that lightning rods discharge the atmosphere?

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PDF page 18+) 00-60 D#00-22 starting with mention of Heary Brothers Lightning Protection Company, Inc., Bryan Panel Report follows:

There is a fundamental problem with HeyBub's post. It is based > Lots of replies imply that grounding will handle a lightning strike,

Reply to
w_tom

Three electric wires enter your house. One connects to earth ground. How are the other two wires earthed? Not earthed if a 'whole house' protector is not properly installed. Two of the three AC electric wires (not earthed by a 'whole house' protector) carry destructive surges (such as lightning) into a building; finding earth ground, destructively, via household appliances. In most homes, only one of three AC electric wires is earthed. In some homes, even that ground is missing or compromised.

It has been rout> Your house should be protected from lightning strikes and this has

Reply to
w_tom

Reply to
w_tom

I'm going to install an outdoor TV antenna, but am confused about how to ground it. Its mast will be 12' above the ground and about 25' over from the house's breaker box ground rod.

Should I use stranded wire instead of solid?

Should I install a ground rod into the dirt directly below the mast, or can I simply run a #4 ground wire from the mast to the breaker box ground rod?

Is there ever any harm in installing a second ground rod, provided it's bonded to the main one?

Reply to
larry moe 'n curly

Several years ago I had my main panel upgraded to 200A, covered by circuit breakers (original system was fuzes). Installer said the above issue was the most important. After he drove in the rod and connected the power system ground to it, he told me to get hold of the phone company and the cable guys and insist that they relocate their grounds to that ground. Once done, previous problems I had had with lightning strikes taking out TVs, etc., went away and I have not had that kind of a problem since. YMMV, I guess

Reply to
Roy Starrin

Thanks

Reply to
Patch

Well the electrical code should be such that these 3 wires are always present together. A strike is going to prefer the 'earthed' wire over the ones not earthed. Even if you install a surge device, the 'earthed' wire is still going to be the easier path to ground.

Its a surge protector, not a lightning protector. It will protect you to some degree from a borked transformer or some odd occurance likely generated local to your neighborhood (Frankenstein). It will absolutely not offer any protection from lightning strikes, direct or indirect.

Lightning will utterly obliterate a surge protector.

Reply to
CL (dnoyeB) Gilbert

20 years of experience here in Florida with hundreds of customers and their computers seems to dispute that. We have more lightning strikes on a typical summer afternoon than most of the country sees in a year. Effective grounding and transient protection works.
Reply to
gfretwell

effective grounding works. "Surge" protectors protect from surges, not lightning.

Reply to
CL (dnoyeB) Gilbert

Very true, but surges may accompany lightning. Both for sensitive equipment.

Reply to
Joseph Meehan

Whole house protection is a standard option these days for the Mains boxes and is readily avaliable. However, that does not negate the need for surge protection on sensitive equipment like computers: It's a different level of protection and also surges are created within the house environ also. NOTHING will protect against all lightning strikes, especially if they are close by.

HTH

Reply to
Pop

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