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Lighting damage

3K views 25 replies 14 participants last post by  Peter Goldwing 
#1 ·
Three days ago I was working outside the new house installing metal hurricane shutters (corrugated sheet metal panels)
It was raining on and off with dark clouds around.
A few rumbles now and then.
I was outside drilling the holes for the track when KABOOM.
The sound was so powerful it almost brought me to my knees.
I was not scared at all but I mostly felt the shock wave of the sound

The house I build is a few hundred yards from the old house. My wife was at home. She was concerned that the lighting might have hit me since i was working with metal, while I was looking at the old house to see if any of the toll trees towering our house was hit.

The neighbor across the street told me to look towards the back of my new house where smoke was coming out.
It turned out that a transformer that was less than 100ft from my location was hit by lightning
The next transformer on the same line was damaged.

We lost power and I went to get my Honda generator to continue the work.
The Florida Power and Light was on the scene in the next hour and both transformers were changed in the next couple of hours Next day I noticed the 4 LED futures that were turned on at lightning time were out of commission. While I was changing them the cable guy showed up and said the underground cable got fried and he was going to lay a temporary one jut on top of the lawn.
Yesterday the neighbor which is on the same transformer as me, told me her AC compressor and the modem went.
Lots of damage by a single strike.

A few times when I changed services I found a surge suppressor on the line side of the main breaker.
I wonder how well they do the job . Anyone familiar with them? Thanks

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#4 ·
Tvss have worked for me so far. Lightning hit my transformer and fried it and nothing in the house was damaged.

To be honest trying to calculate how lightning will affect your home with out knowing where it will strike is impossible. All you can do is try to dump the spike to spike to ground and hope for the best.

The tvss i have i pay $6 a month to the poco and they offer replacement for anything that gets damaged. I figure its cheap insurance.
 
#5 ·
If you're in FL it's best to have all the surge protection you can get.
TVSS's do their job and they do it well. That being said, lightning travels through 5 miles of free air before it arrives, so at best, don't expect total protection.

I know people with POCO surge arrestors and they make claims all the time. Big claims too.

NEMA has some good information on surge
https://www.nemasurge.org/
 
#12 ·
If we shut down every time we have surges we'd never get anything done. In the 6+ years we've been here we went through three 150kVA transformers (POCO owned) and we've had extended outages twice (Irma & one other event).

On any given summer day when a storm is even approaching, we get surges at a rate of about 1-4 per minute for about 15-20 minutes. Once the lightning arrives it seems to get better, from a power quality perspective. It sounds like cannons going off right above the roof.

When we first started this place up we'd do an orderly shut down and open the breakers to expensive machinery when that happened. But now we just ride right through it. We have some good TVSS's on each 3 phase service and they serve us well. I should probably dig into them and check their status which would be best done during winter.

That being said, I'd never continue roofing or streetlamp replacement during those conditions. We've had some pretty sad situations around here from that. Seeing a human take a direct hit is something nobody wants to ever see. I have never seen it first hand but I know some who have.

The majority of our injuries & fatalities around here happen around sporting venues (kids playing soccer, football or golfers), water related (ocean or pool), roofing and then at times even people inside their home when they're unloading the dishwasher, playing video games, etc.

I'll 2nd that radio tower comment. For several years that I lived in a condo we used to drink beer at 5pm daily at an unoccupied cover parking space at grade under the building. A CBS affiliate across the street has a tower around 300' or so. That thing would get hit multiple times in a single storm. It was so regular we recognized the twang it made as it got rattled. Best protection you can have is a 300' tower 100 yards away. You'll never get hit.

I've considered getting into the lightning market. It's a pretty big market. There is lightning detection, lightning prediction and of course lightning mitigation. And we're in the perfect location to do real world testing. Maybe one day...
 
#26 ·
I finally found what insurance Florida Power and Light is offering around here.
$9.95 per month for the appliance or $9.95 for electronics or 14.95 for both+tax
Thats $180 per year.
I find that to be too expensive. The only damage done to my house in all my life was about what they charge for a year.
I will look for individual surge protectors and Ill take my chance
 
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