does grounding a house protect it from lightning damage?

Question

the chimney on my house was struck by lightning, the charge traveled down the chimney and caused the tile around the fireplace to explode. a few electronic devices in the house as well as the air conditioning unit and the phone lines were damaged. if my home was properly grounded, would it have prevented the damage from the lightning strike.

Answer 1

Proper grounding would cosist of a lightning rod sticking above everything else on the house and a wire from that, down into the ground a distance. This would give lightning an easy path to the ground, hopefully bypassing everything else.

This should protect you from the worst damage, but lighting is unpredictable - it may hit several places, it may bypass the rod or fork. However, 99% of the time, this prevents further damage.

Also, as you noticed - lightning is pretty powerful. A person hit by lighting can hae their clothes and shoes blown off! If you are in an area that has a lot of storms, you should consider putting expensive electronics into a bunch of power bars that not only have surge protection, but that you unplug during intense storms.

Answer 2

USA Yes, proper grounding WILL help protect the house. That is what ground rods and bonding the metal water pipe are for - to dissipate non-system generated fault currents. Without getting into all the stuff behind what I just wrote, the more grounding, the better path the lightning current has to take to the ground where it can be dissipated. And the building ground and bonding system is supposed to be bonded to the lightning protection system ground.

Vincent has a good answer. Follow his advice.

Answer 3

not much will protect you from a direct hit .

Make sure your cable tv and phone line are grounded right before they enter your house will keep lightning hits that happen further away from zooming in your house on these wires.

Your electric service needs to have 2 ground rods 6' min apart connected to your breaker panel with #6 copper wire

and if you have city water your water meter needs to have a ground wire from your panel to it with #4 copper , connected across both sides of water meter.

any metal roof can be grounded to the 2 ground rods also

Answer 4

Actually, more people survive lightning storms outside, than inside. So you're more safer in a car (insulation from the rubber), inside people are clueless and think they're safe, but think about telephones, 2% of people are electicuted, through the telephone line, i don't have a source, but I watched this show on the Discovery Channel called Dr. Know, and he went into this investigation, so you'll have to believe me

Answer 5

Answer: no. You'll need lightning rods for that, and those need to be separately grounded from the electrical circuits in your house.

You need to get surge suppressor outlets for your stuff; I believe that there's a different suppressor to help with phones.

Answer 6

Nope