Next door was struck by lightning yesterday and the resultant chimney stack explosion has propelled bricks onto my house and chipped a couple of the bricks. Obviously changing them is a non starter as the resultant finish would be worse than they are now, but I am concerned about the lack of protection the brick face now has. Do I just leave them or would applying a bit of transparent sealer prevent any future spalling? The chips are about 10-15mm deep and about 75mm diameter.
TIA
John
Scars of honour. If you can find the bits epoxy mortar or Milliput will glue them back on.
Milliput is the new Isopon?
I have resolved surface damage by cutting out bricks (drilling out the mortar) and refitting them the other way around. Obviously, that requires that the other side is the same, which sometimes isn't the case with facing bricks.
Out of interest, Where you there when it happened? What's the state of their house now?
I was in at the time and there was an almighty bang, but I didn't hear any falling masonry, and didn't know where the hit was. I was then waylaid as the strike had destroyed my router, desktop PC and anything attached to it like a printer etc, I was listening to test match special via a PVR and stereo, both of which went phut along with my telephone line. It was only when I took the dog out later that I saw the damage.
The house next door (1993 build) has a chimney pot perched precariously against the remains of the stack. Large pieces of masonry were thrown as far as the bottom of their garden, about 40 feet. Lightning entered the roofspace breaking and scorching a truss and then found the loft aerial and made its way to earth. A blanking plate on a back box was blown off, and the filter on the phone master socket was blown apart.
They have no electrics except one socket, which is not RCD protected. We have changed the RCD, but it still trips when any load is drawn (it can support a low energy bedside lamp), so this is a wait for the electrician, and looks like a nasty job.
Insurance company said someone would be out Friday night but still no one as of now. Fire brigade car attended to advise on the safety of the stack.
Location is Cambridgeshire.
A mate of mine rang me from the London-Wakefield train at the time to ask me about the storm, as he was crawling from signal to signal between Sandy and St Neots - but my phone was out of action!
In the vein of UK-DIY I was able to restore phone service temporarily by replacing the master socket as BT can't come till Monday pm. The lightning protectors in the master socket was obviously overwhelmed (Overhead feed).
John
In message , JohnW writes
I was sat in Tescos car park, St Neots, having lunch around 13:00 to
13:30. It was a very impressive storm, I was keeping an eye on the pylons and cranes near the power station expecting to see them take a strike, fortunately they didn't.Hope you and your neighbour get sorted soon, plenty of scope for a bit of d-i-y maybe.
I'd been meaning to stick the bits back on some facing bricks. I should have got a move on as one day I came home to find them in a neat little pile. The wife had decided to collect them together. I've now got a jigswa puzzle to solve as there were about 4 bricks affected!
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