The Golden State: Where & How to Live, Secure, Visit, Enjoy and Thrive in California

First Aid For The Ailing Houses

As for lightning rods for the house, the Underwriters' Association heartily endorses their installation. On steeply pitched roofs, rods need be only 10 inches high; on flat roofs they should be 5 feet high and 25 feet apart. There should be at least two down-conducting cables to underground water pipes or equally good grounding.

Tall, valuable trees can be similarly protected by cables which run down from the highest branches to good grounding

You have experienced the phenomenon of lights fading momentarily during an electrical storm; this is occasioned by the passage of a static charge from the atmosphere through the arresters on the power line. This discharge carries with it a portion of the current in the power line; hence, the fading.

Lightning strikes trees much more often than it strikes power lines. Trees form an almost perfect path for lightning, especially when healthy and full of sap. An outside radio antenna is provided with an arrester, not so much for protection against lightning as to drain off the static charges that accumulate, which, without an arrester, would go to ground trough the set.

Television antennas should be protected with a special lightning arrester. The lead-in cable from the antenna to the set is heavy enough to conduct the static charge of lightning through the set and into the house wiring, which is grounded. This would ruin the set. The simplest form of lightning arrester for TV lead-in cables is a device fastened to the cable before it reaches the set and which has a heavy copper wire leading to a stake of metal set into the ground. Since electricity always hunts the quickest and least-resistant path to ground, it will leave the lead-in cable and channel itself into the ground along the better path provided for it by the heavy wire and stake.

Another fallacy is that lightning is attracted to locust trees and is more likely to strike them than trees of other kinds. This is not the case. Lightning strikes a tree not because of its species but because it happens to provide an easy path to ground.