whole house surge protectors

[trader4]

I think the concept with the "discharge the cloud" approach is that you put up a whole lot of lightning rods over the area to be protected. That is supposed to then provide a path for current flow between the cloud and ground that in turn lowers the potential difference. The obvious question is how much current can actually flow compared to the enormous capacity of the cloud? During a lightning strike you have an ionized path which provides good conductivity. And there is obviously a huge amount of energy to discharge. With just lightning rods and no actual strike to provide ionization my bet is that any discharge is going to be negligible and hence the rods would just serve as a lot of conventional rods.

[HeyBub]

There was a similar conflict in the 18th century, shortly after Ben Franklin invented the lightening rod. The conflict arose over whether churches should install them.

The controversy arose as follows: Even IF lighting rods worked, it would be clearly against God's will to install one. Churches in most of America, because of their steeples and bell-towers, were often the tallest buildings in the community and the prime target for a bolt from the grey. Here's how the controversy resolved itself:

The churches WITHOUT lightning rods eventually all burnt to the ground and the congregations had to move to churches who WERE defying God's will (or Thor's).