Normally I don’t do this kind of thing but I promised a friend I would, so here goes.
About 2 weeks ago, I was online talking to my friend Wendy, who lives about 30 miles away from me with her husband. We’ve talked online for a while but she’s never been over to the house. It was a night we were supposed to have a big thunderstorm and once she started to see flashes outside, she told me she had to log off and unplug her computer so it wouldn’t get fried in the event that her house was struck by lightning.
I said bye, I wasn’t worried. She didn’t understand why I was so nonchalant about the whole thing. I told her I’d send her a picture that explained it.
Then I promptly forgot. My bad.
So here’s why. See, my wife and I live in a house that dates back to the 1920s. I have no idea when it was done, but I think somewhere in the 40s or 50s, whoever lived here then was big into Ham radio and put a giant antenna on the roof. Now you might think that would make my house even more liable to be hit by lightning, but I’m not worried a bit. When he put up the antenna, he had the same idea and put up a massive lightning rod as well. The picture is at the left, but it’s hard to see how big from that perspective. It’s mounted on top of a full-sized telephone pole and then it goes up another phone pole’s worth in lightning rod. That safeguards the house, but after we moved in, since we don’t use the Ham radio antenna, or the over-the-air aerial that’s on the same mast, I detached everything from the house and then ran a grounding line to the ground. I had meant to remove the antenna entirely but it’s absurdly heavy and I’d need a crew and a crane to get it down. So even if the antenna itself is hit by lightning, it’s going to be harmless as well.
Add to that the fact that my computers and all electronics in the house are protected by two levels of protection. They’re all plugged into APC battery backup/surge protectors and then, each computer runs off of a separate switchbox/surge suppressor.
Yeah Zeus, let me have it! I’ve got things to do online.
