Lightning protection?

naturist wrote:

time2roll wrote:
I have my AM/FM antenna up there as a lightning rod.
Radio should absorb the hit just fine with a direct strike. ;)

I hope you are jesting. Lightning hits your AM/FM antenna, your radio and every electric/electronic thing in your rig will almost certainly get fried, and you'll be lucky indeed if half those things don't catch fire into the bargain. May you never get hit.

Ok, not in my RV but I have had a "Direct Hit" on the radio tower I was using as a police dispatcher.. Kind of impressive Our gear survived, but what can I say well trained Ham Radio Operators installed it.. Oh we did loose half a converter but the batteries held.

You do not even need a direct hit.. Even if it hits a hundred yards off you can easily fry all ACTIVE electronics. Stuff that's shut down stands a chance and if it is properly protected it may survive as our tower did. but..

Well closest I've come with the RV is about 150 Yards.. Only the park's Internet routers got fried.. I survived. Strangely the strike was on teh LOWEST point in the park (A lake)

Lightning is so powerfull I don't think you could protect from a direct hit on an RV. As stated you may be able to divert it or dilute it somehow, if that is the right term. Exposed as you are it might be worth a try.

Living on the coast in the SE I have had several close calls. Won't say I'm scared but really respect it, kind of like a rattlesnake.

I was in my garage using a dremel once and lightning hit a large pine about 30 feet from the open garage door. No active storm but I had heard thunder in the distance. Bolt came down the tree, hit a temp street light ( not hooked to A/C anymore ) attached to the tree and jumped from there. Fire actually shot out of the dremel I was holding. Killed the garage opener and my computer. If I had not had on rubber soles shoes I suspect it would have killed me too. A noise I can't describe, and it blew pine bark off the tree into the garage. Not injured other than a severe tingling all over and severe need for a rest and cold beer.

A class A in the park we were in last winter in the Keys was next to a tree that was hit, not a direct hit. Don't know the final outcome but all electrical was dead. They they brought in two huge wreckers to tow it out of it's space as nothing worked, unit engine etc. totally dead electrically. Took it to Miami I think. No injuries to people. Not sure if they were in it at the time or gone.

Good luck!

A foot square solid silver column could survive a minor strike but not a major one electrically speaking.

With metal towers and building skeletons electron flow passes invisible on the outside of metal as well as inside. Technically an ionized feeder lasting milliseconds creates a path for the main jolt that passes from earth to clouds.

It was ionized feelers that caused the RV rig noted above to fail the electrical in the vehicle. Does not have to actually contact electrical circuitry. A feeler can pass close to any circuit that can induct through magnetic flux. Through induction an engine coil could potential two hundred thousand volts for a few microseconds. Might leave slight visible signs of passage but anything electronic would suffer.

In a concrete structure that has rebar tied to earth the chances of stray feelers exiting the concrete are slight.

Lightning strikes that pass through passenger aircraft go mostly unappreciated by passengers.

i respect lighting very much

41 years ago,i was upstairs in the stick house , looking out the window over the back yard when lighting hit the oak tree at the edge of the yard

I was not only deaf for ten minutes, i was temporarily blinded

after the storm passed we picked bark out of the yard, the outside walls, the roof, and both the front and backyards of two houses across the street from us

there was a 50ft long white gash down the side of the tree

We were camping in the Lancaster, Pa area during a storm and lightning hit about 20 feet from our camper. All power went out in the camper and I thought it was the campgrounds power but found it had tripped three breakers in our motorhome. I reset them and everything worked fine except the monitor panel was lit all the time like I had pushed the test button but still seemed to show levels.
Went to to dinner after the storm and found that many things in our car did not work, no power steering, stability control, no speedometer ect. but it still ran okay. After getting to the dealer for a check, the lightning had fried 5 computers in the car at a cost of around $5000. The only visible damage was to the drivers side mirror which looked like Jack Frost had done his thing to the glass.

Hmmm ... I was always told that lightening is the massive flow of electrons up to the positively charged storm clouds ... although it looks visually as if the bolt is traveling down from the clouds to the ground. Given that, the reasoning is that a passenger vehicle's non-conductive tires stop the flow of electrons up into the metal skin of a vehicle. Hence metal skinned passenger vehicles with rubber tires are supposedly pretty safe from being in the path of a bolt because electrons cannot get onto their metal skin so as to follow a path up into the sky.

If the above is what's going on, then it seems like a rubber tired RV - with no metal steps attached to it's frame reaching down to the ground, or no metal foot of a leveling jack connecting it's frame down to the ground, or no power cord plugged into a pedestal connecting the RV's frame to a power grid's ground - would be just about as safe from attracting a lightening strike as a common metal skinned rubber tired pasenger vehicle. :h

The rubber tires on a car are not going to insulate you from a lightning strike, they are way too thin to resist the voltage of a lightning bolt.

fj12ryder wrote:
The rubber tires on a car are not going to insulate you from a lightning strike, they are way too thin to resist the voltage of a lightning bolt.

True enough.. If lightening can jump for miles through the sky, a few inches of rubber sure isn't going to slow it down!

2oldman wrote:

naturist wrote:

time2roll wrote:
Radio should absorb the hit just fine with a direct strike. ;)

I hope you are jesting.

Yah, I'd say the winky wink indicates that.

Yes and no. I don't worry about it actually. Might unplug but that would be the extent of my preparation for a direct hit by lightning.

I mean really, what are you really going to do to prepare a mobile unit?
No fear of this.

Phil
do you suggest rubber jacks & lifters & stands, rubber levelers for the OPs RV ?

i'm all for unplugging the shore cord, when lighting is happening

but everything else, 'all rubber' {no metal connections} just can't be done
with any 'towed RV' if it self propelled with a forward axle, it is going to have metal touching the ground,
grounding the RV is not a problem,
Isolating the electrical circuits is what is needed

as for the car computers, that was EMF/EMP destroying ICs in the computers
most likely fried all the microprocessors, as they wee not 'Hardened' and where connected to the cars electrical systems