Lightning Rods, The Storm Protection Of Your Home

The lightning rod systems provide a reliable lightning protection of your home. You cannot calculate if your house will be hit by the lightning or not. And if it is going to be hit, you cannot predict the point it hits your house in (though for sure it will be one of the highest parts of the house, very probably the roof). Therefor, if you want to minimize the potential damages cuased by lightning if it decides to hit your home, you should install the lightning conductors.

The lightning rod installation requires a professional electrician. The conductors have to survive really high (couple of million Volts) voltage attacs if they happen and therefor they need to comply certain rules (each country, in US each state has it´s own lightning protection standards and regulation). On the other hand, the lightning rod systems are not that expansive (compared to the huge damages lightnings cause) and you can afford them even if you just own a small house.

When buying the lightning protection, you can choose from two basic types of conducting systems, passive or active.

Passive lightning protection

Passive lightning conductor systems are available in two basic forms; either as the classic lightning rod systems (roof ridge conductor with two earthings or more earthings based on the protection diameter of the building) used for residential gable (or any slope) roofs; or as the conductor grids (gridlines created from conductors covering whole building with two or more rods for grounding) used for flat or low slope residential roofs.

In both cases is cheap, easy to install system, even though if you decide for zinc-coated steel conductors, you have to penetrate them from time to time to avoid their corrosion, which produces you higher expenses in the future. Active lightning protection Active lightning protection systems (called also Pulsars) are more used at higher non-residential buildings where in case of passive protection it would be necessary to install several passive lightning conductor systems. They represent active sources of high voltage signal with managed frequency and amplitude and they do not wait for lightning to hit them passively. They work as the electrical voltage condensers (they don´t need an extra charging or batteries) and multipliers during the storm and when condensed, they shoot the high voltage beam towards the storm and drive the energy of the lightning to the ground.

Active lightning conductors are more expansive than classic rods, on the other hand, they offer many advantages compared to passive systems:
- active systems need less rods;
- just 1 or 2 groundings are required;
- minimum maintenance and revision cost;
- very durable solution;
- if you are interested, the active lightning protection companies can provide you also with the lightning hit counter for you to know how many time your building has been hit by the lightning.