When Lightning Strikes My Home, What Can Happen?
Lightning strikes are more common than most people think, so it’s better to be safe than sorry when it comes to protecting your Sarasota home. Here’s what you need to know about what happens when lightning strikes your home.
Fire Damage
From thunderstorms to hurricanes, the Sarasota area is not immune to severe weather. When lightning strikes your home, it might use pipes, cables, downspouts, and other conductive metal objects to reach the ground quickly, but lightning doesn’t travel exclusively through metal.
Lightning can come into contact with or travel through your home’s wood elements, from the roof to the structure to the siding. When this happens, the most immediate threat is fire. To prevent devastating damage, install a lightning rod on your home. This won’t prevent lightning from striking your home, but it will channel the lightning away if your home does get struck.
Power Surges
If lightning travels through your home’s cables or wiring, the resulting power surge can cause significant damage to the wiring as well as to any connected appliances, equipment, or electronics. Though not all lightning strikes travel through the home’s electrical system, most still create enough of a surge to cause serious damage.
How to Protect Your Electronics From a Lightning Strike
The easiest way to protect your electronics from potential damage is to unplug them. This practically eliminates the possibility of lightning traveling through the electrical system and damaging your electronics.
Because it’s not always possible to plan ahead by unplugging all your devices before a storm, installing a surge protection system offers another option for keeping your electronics safe from a lightning strike. Surge protection manages the incoming voltage and blocks it when necessary to keep the current at a safe level.
Need professional help protecting your home from a lightning strike or recovering after one? Call the surge protection specialists at Luminous Electric to learn whether whole-home surge protection is a good option for you: .