5 ms·
A lightning bolt carries a current upwards of 100,000 amps, and has upwards of 10 billion joules of energy. A high end consumer grade surge suppressor might be
by osamagirl69 4y ago
A lightning bolt carries a current upwards of 100,000 amps, and has upwards of 10 billion joules of energy.
A high end consumer grade surge suppressor might be rated for 1000 joules, and a few thousand amps of peak current.
If lightning directly strikes your house wiring, no amount of surge suppressors are going to save you.
For an idea of what a surge suppressor that can handle the blow of a full on lightning strike looks like, take a look at the units used by utility companies on their high tension lines. Typically they are about a 6" in diameter and often several feet long -- and those units still need to be replaced after a single direct hit! https://www.equipmentimes.com/product/details/Lightning-Arrester_14845.html https://www.equipmentimes.com/product/details/Lightning-Arre...
The best thing that you can do to protect yourself in the future is to have a lightning rod network installed on your roof, which will shunt the current from the strike directly to the ground.
Otherwise the only failsafe alternative is to completely unplug sensitive equipment (still OK to run from battery but with all ethernet etc cables unplugged -- wireless network only) whenever there is a storm predicted.
- oakmad 4y agoA lightning bolt carries a current upwards of 100,000 amps, and has upwards of 10 billion joules of energy. How many gigawatts is that? I’ve a car I need to jump start.
- WithinReason 4y agoAbout 1.21 jigawatts
- me_me_me 4y agoEnough to travel back in time afaik
- gbraad 4y agoOnly at 88mph...
- ASalazarMX 4y agoAs we don't have long cables, guess we'll have to time it perfectly.
- MagnumOpus 4y agoAbout 1,000 gigawatts peak power for a few microseconds, plenty to jump start your time machine.
- JackMcMack 4y agoYup. The amount of energy from a direct strike is simply too much. It already travelled a great distance through a highly resistive material (air), even if there is an "ideal" path to ground some energy will find its way. Consumer grade suppressors are meant for indirect strikes, overhead lines near you, or a direct hit on your neighbour's house.
- Jipazgqmnm 4y agoAt least in Germany, surge suppressors are hierarchical of type 1, 2 and 3. Type 1 handles the major blast, followed by type 2 to protect the installation and type 3 for sensitive electronics. The OP apparently just had a type 3 surge suppressor that unsurprisingly blew. Afaik the proper way is having a proper lightning rod together with the aforementioned cascade of surge suppressors. And of course a PE!
- amelius 4y agoHow about a circuit that disconnects the wall sockets upon a strike? If you make the length of the cables to your sockets divided by the propagation speed much longer than the time it takes the control signal, it could work, no?
- accountofme 4y agosadly it won't work ... the lightning will go around the switch through the air, just like it did all the way down. Edit: spelling
- amelius 4y agoSo if you unplugged your computer the lightning would still find its way, through the air, to your computer?
- accountofme 4y agoIt could if it was still part of the lowest resistance path to ground. Electricity is like water, it wants to flow from high potential difference to low potential difference. Lightning (as far as I know) does not have consciousness and is not out to get your computer! The parent post was talking about putting a automatic switch in between the power supply to the house (ground active neutral) and switching it off when lightning struck, the problem there is that the switch will not do much if the lightning air gaps around it.
- amelius 4y agoIsn't it more likely that the current will go from one terminal of the now unconnected cord to another terminal of the same cord?
- accountofme 4y agoIt all depends on the what is the shortest path to ground. Ground is also a relative term for a lightning strike. When lightning hits the ground, a potential field emanates from that point. The further out the closer to 0V the potential difference is. As such it depends on where the strike is in comparison to the house, your wiring, where your house is grounded etc. For example, if the grounding point on your house is very close to the strike, your house ground will be raised to the voltage of that point away from the stike. The path to 0V may be through your active wiring, your powesupply, the house frame or the water pipes. So yeah, hope that helps
- accountofme 4y agoLightning rods are called lightning rods but they are not actually designed to take a strike head on. They are actually designed to remove charge from the clouds above where the rod is installed. Static electrons loves to congregate in small places, I.e. the tip of a needle or the edge or fold in a piece of metal (can help the paint job add extra paint to those places it is needed most, bonus!) Anyway a lightning rod is probably the best protection but yeah the copper would vapourise if it.was actually hit, causing a fire.
- ahahahahah 4y agoThis is false.
- accountofme 4y agoPlease elaborate on why.
- ahahahahah 4y agoI'm entirely unsurprised by hn's voting on the verbose completely wrong comment and the short completely correct comment. Neither of them provided any support for their claims, but one was wrong and wasted a lot of people's time. And even worse, some of those people are now likely to go off and share that exact same wrong information just as confidently somewhere else.
- OrderlyTiamat 4y agoAccording to wikipedia [0], such a device was actually proposed by a priest in 1754. The theory was more or less as you describe. But there is debate on whether it counts as a lightning rod, and apparently most lightning protection systems work exactly the way you said they don't: to provide a very low impedence path for the current to go safely to ground, which is called a Franklin design. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightning_rod#Europe https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightning_rod#Europe
- webmobdev 4y agoThat's a blast from the past - when we were kids in India we were warned never to use the telephone during a thunderstorm - my mom even used to immediately unplug it, the TV and the refrigerator during such weather.
- yetihehe 4y agoI've had a neighbour which had her computer destroyed by lightning. She bought a new one and disconnected it during all thunderstorms from power. But she didn't disconnect her modem from phone line (it was in 1997). After another thunderstorm, modem stopped working. When I pulled it out, the main modem chip had a nice hole with some copper vapourised near it. So, unplugging telephone in some areas is a good idea. Now my whole town has proper protectors and I didn't have any problems with electric equipment since years.
- xlaacid 4y agoyou are incorrect. a whole house surge protector will stop a lighting strike. its what they are designed for.