James "Cubby" Culbertson wrote:
Hiya,
My sister recently had a bolt of lightning hit very near to
her house. She lost a number of electronic appliances as
a result. My initial thought is that she may not have a
good ground for her house. I'm wondering if there is a
way to test it or is it mostly just a visual thing? As
well, are whole house surge protectors good for this type
of application? I suspect not but thought I'd ask. I'm
in a high lightning area (2nd highest number in this state,
FL is no. 1) and really don't have any trees nearby so I'm
beginning to think maybe a separate ground system just for
lightning protection might make sense. Obviously I'd
locate the ground rod as far away from the house ground but
I'm wondering if this makes sense? Cheers,
cc

A good resource is your local code enforcement office. We
learned the hard way that a lightning hit, IF it uses the house
wiring to get to earth, or vice-versa, can cause the earth rod to
lose its conductivity to earth. Apparently it affects the earth
for a radius ofa 6 or 8 feet or so because they moved our ground
rod about twelve feet over and drove a new one. We wouldn't have
noticed it except for 220V equipment that started acting up due
to the lack of a good earth ground reference between the two 110
"phases" (US). The new rod fixed all the problems.
Our local code enforcement is the one referred us to a good
electrician who came out and figured it out in about 5 minutes.
That was after three guys from the yellow pages who were just
"electricians"; this guy was an inspector and knew what to look
for apparently. The only thing he charged us for was the rod and
some cable to the meter. The other folks wanted to start tearing
things apart. I'm glad I resisted.

HTH
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