Don’t Attract Lightning – Eliminate It!

Effective Lightning Protection Systems Don’t Attract Lightning, they Eliminate it!

Most lightning protection systems are interception systems that don’t reduce the odds that lightning will strike a facility. Instead, they mitigate the risks of a lightning strike by controlling and trying to disperse the energy they create.

The system does more than just capture the energy of the lightning strike. It must bring the energy to the ground without impacting the building’s structure or the electrical equipment inside. Lightning can also generate a significant amount of heat. The protection system must minimize the impact of this heat from the strike so that it doesn’t create a fire or melt building components.

It all starts with strike termination devices or the lightning rod / air terminal. Lightning is predictable in that it prefers to strike the highest point of a structure and prefers to hit a conductive metal. The rods create a preferred point of strike, thus the strike termination device is the highest point of the building.

Further, cables run from the termination devices along the edges of the roof and then down through the building. From the cables, the energy is passed onto a grounding mechanism, which allows the energy of the strike to be dispersed into the ground where it can’t do any harm. There will be bonding, or fittings, to secure the cable to the roof. The system is permanently and properly grounded in order to disperse a lightning strike safely, that is, it’s encapsulated or buried with chemical backfill to lower the system’s resistance. Lowering the system’s electrical resistance allows the lightning to be discharged more successfully into the ground.

Surge protection devices are installed at every service entrance to stop utility lines from spreading lightning into the building.

LEC offers another level of Lightning Protection

It’s a technology called a Charge Transfer System. It actively prevents lightning from striking in a certain area. It uses a charge dissipation terminal to release the static building up during thunderstorms. Without that charge, a streamer cannot form. Therefore, the whole area is an unappealing target for lightning, and it will instead strike somewhere outside of the range of the system, where it can meet a streamer.

Lightning Eliminators is a one stop shop for lightning safety products. We have 3 individual product lines that can be integrated together for a comprehensive lightning protection systems.

These product lines include

1. Lightning Prevention Products – Dissipation Array Systems (DAS), Spine Ball Ionizers (SBI), Spine Ball Terminals (SBT), and Streamer Delaying Air Terminals (SDAT)
2. Grounding and Bonding Products – Smart Ground Testing, Chem Rod, Ground Augmentation Fill and LECWELD
3. Surge Protection Devices – Facility Guard, Transient Limiters, Hybrid Surge Protectors, among others

That’s why we say, don’t attract lightning, eliminate it!