12-18-2009, 07:11 PM
One of the main reasons for grounding rods is so that the electricity that shorts to the metal frame of your toaster oven, which is grounded, will cheerfully go to ground through the third prong on the plug instead of waiting for you to come along and provide a path to ground. In other words the ground wire system in your house doesn't have to be good, just better than you standing on the ground. If the lava were such a great insulator you wouldn't need a ground system to protect you from getting a shock because it would be like standing on a rubber mat. I suspect that the lava used as an insulator in electric experiments was carefully selected and perfectly dry. The lava your house is on is saturated with slightly acidic rain water. Your concrete slab is somewhat alkaline so there are probably enough ions floating around that the the ground is still the place to put ground rods. The vast voltages and amps associated with lightning are so huge that I think you are screwed no matter what. How do lightning rods work anyway? Lightning can explode a tree 5' in diameter and turns vast swaths of the atmosphere incandescent. How can any conductor handle that? Seems like putting up a lightning rod would be like poking a hole in a dike; yea, water will flow there but so much water is there to be drained that only damage will result. Obviously there is something I am not seeing.