02-08-2018, 10:59 PM
quote:
Originally posted by MarkP
I have never understood how a lightning rod is supposed to work. Lightning can leap across miles of clear air, melting things and exploding trees when it does. I think that if you actually get directly hit, you're screwed. You would have to have a copper conductor the size of a tree to conduct the energy and even then it would be glowing red hot after the strike. However direct hits are rare. The extraneous EMP and stray electricity around the actual lightning covers a huge area though. That is what you can hope to mitigate.
I think.
Kind of my thoughts as well. I found an average lightning strike current on the internet as 30,000 amps, so even if 0000 wire is used to ground a rod, which has resistance of .00245 ohms per 50 ft.
Power dissipated in the grounding wire would be I**2 x R = 2200 kilo watts.
That's energy expended per time, and it would be over in a fraction of a second, but still, imagine turning on a two million watt bulb inside your house. Not something I would want to do.