Close lightning. Too Close!

System

I would like opinion on a situation I am in with my recently installed wind generator.
The tower is 40 ft tall and located 25 ft behind a metal building. The building is 18x20 and the wires from the wind tower go through it to the garage which is immediately in front of it and next to the house.There is a combiner box in the metal building and 400w pv on the roof of it. The inverter and batteries are in the garage. The inverter feeds a subpanel in the basement of the house for backup power and sells back through a panel in the garage through the main 200A panel in the house.
The other night I got up at 4AM to the sound of a thunderstorm. I wanted to see the wind generator spin up in the storm so I went to the back door to watch it. I only watched it for two or three lightning flashes when it was directly struck. I watched it hit and had three very distinct bolts burned into the retina of my right eye for half an hour. I was in the house looking out the back door when this happened and was about 50- 60 ft from the tower. The induction from it mixed up the pixels on my computer monitor and tripped some breakers in the house.
The most damage happened in the garage where it blew the bypass breaker out of the ac side of the inverter panel and fried some relays in the wind gen meter panel. It also ruined my MX 60 :-(.
Now, my wife asked if it would be struck again and if I had thought of lightning before I put it up. Yes I did. Infact I got LA302's for the ac and dc panels and one for the base of the tower which did not blow out but bulged a little. An 8ft ground rod in the center of the foundation of the wind tower is attached to the tower and grounds the dc- wire (dc generator)The guy wires are attached to steel loops in the ground with concrete poured around them. I could improve the ground of the tower by looping copper all around and driving more rods. My wife thinks I should just take it down. I do not wish to have further damage. I don't know if it was a fluke or will it happen again?. It has only been up for a month and whammo ! I don't mind telling you , I'm scared shitless. What are your experiences and thoughts on this subject?
Chuck.

niel

Re: Close lightning. Too Close!

chuck,
sorry to hear you got struck. i am having some troubles in visualizing how it was laid out in relation to the metal building and the heights of each. did the metal building get hit or did it just travel through from the wind genny? was the wind genny itself hit or damaged?
i would say that beefing up the ground is warranted and if you have a multi-legged tower you should have a ground rod for each leg of the tower and intertied underground with at least #6 solid copper wire. the lightning protection devices you got are trash now and need replaced.
i wish i was there to give better advice on the circumstances you have, but no matter what there is no guarantee that it won't happen again. the alternative would be to give it an alternate target a bit farther away from you, but still near the wind genny. this doesn't have to be fancy or expensive, but must be taller than the wind genny and conduct electricity. basically it'll be a lightning rod. it may be feasable to place lightning rods onto the metal building and run heavy gage wire from them to a ground rod, but i fear the proximity to you and your equipment may make side targets of both or alternately it could protect both as a main strike may hit it instead of you and your equipment. lightning does what it wants to do unfortunately as i've seen it hit lower non conductive targets when it had higher metalic alternatives to hit. nobody can say for certain what it will do. you may even take the wind genny down and find that lightning will still strike you. that wind genny may have actually taken a strike that would've hit your house had it not been there. we will never know for sure though.

System2

Re: Close lightning. Too Close!

The wind tower is higher than the metal building and just behind it by about 25 ft. I thought a 40 ft tower was small and never seriously worried about a strike. Even so I did use the LA302s and grounded the tower. It is a free standing light pole with guy wires added.
The LA302 is no good after a strike? I was hoping to use them again.
The more I talk about it the more I think I'll take the S.O.B. down. I hate to accept defeat but I can't risk fire and worry about strikes all the time. Maybe I'll just put more cash into PVs instead.
I hear what you are saying about it taking a hit for the house or shed. No one knows if it would have hit the other buildings although it never did before and I've lived here for 10 years. I have a ranch style home one story and two car garage with the metal shed out back of the garage. The lightning hit the blades of the wind genny directly. They are aluminum 5 foot across. I was looking right at it . Three distinct bolts slammed it like a hammer.Two hit the tips of the blades as it was turning. One hit the shaft. I can see marks on it with my binoculars.Pretty unsettling. The one crazy thing is it did'nt kill it. It still puts out voltage.
I'm beginning to think alt energy is too expensive and dangerous for what I am gaining.
PVs are so high priced you have to be a millionare to afford an array big enough to do any thing. I just let mother nature in the house with the wind generator. :x
Before people start thinking they can go off grid they better think twice. Its an up hill battle to be sure. :-(

niel

Re: Close lightning. Too Close!

before giving up on it try the idea of an alternate target and redo the ground protections. the wires leading off from the wind generator should have something that could bleed off a strike and send it to ground before reaching the metal building. it may even be good to droop those wires down towards the ground and then back up as lightning is highly unlikely to travel upward again. do know that the electronics is prone to blowout from the ElectroMagnetic Pulse so other devices should still be inplace to protect the system. this is true even if you still decide to get rid of the wind generator as the emp could be picked up and sent down the wires from the pvs too without a direct strike even occuring. much of the inside the home damage was more than likely emp. in the meantime disconnect all wiring going from the wind generator towards the metal building. it is at this time not properly protected from another strike.
i am curious as to the make and model number of that wind generator to survive a direct strike.

System2

Re: Close lightning. Too Close!

Hi chuck

Sorry to hear your story, it must be a traumatic experience. They do say lightning never hits twice but one never knows.

I would however give alternative energy one more chance. I do live completely of grid but do not (yet) have a wind generator. 2 years ago, when I was still living in rented accommodations in town with a normal electricity hook up, our line got hit by lightning about 1/2 km down the road (overhead line)
It melted our fuse box, melted the DSL Modem/Router and 2 Computers connected to it and destroyed every appliance connected at the time on 3 different circuits. TVs,satellite,Washing machine and even the blender in the kitchen turned to black horrible burning plastic.

3 other houses where affected the same way. Luckily no fires broke out anywhere.

So, allthou it went into you windgeny probably because it was the highest and most convenient thing around, Niels suggestion about a higher tower/lightning rood might cure that problem rather quickly and easily. It could have happen to anything, don't blame the trusty windmill,as you say, it still delivers!

Greetings from sunny spain

Chris

niel

Re: Close lightning. Too Close!

you know that emp could very well have come through the wires from the utility connection as well. tell your wife that being on the grid with no renewable energy sources is not a protection from lightning strikes either. i too have experienced lightning coming through the utility wires and blowing out stuff in another place i had years ago. lightning has to go somewhere and it would have hit something else like your home(as previously mentioned) or a utility pole.
chris,
when you were in florida i would suppose that you saw what storms can be like in the usa. would you have ever fathomed anything like it had you not seen it for yourself? have you ever experienced a closeup strike while here?

System2

Re: Close lightning. Too Close!

Sorry to hear of your trouble. I too had lightening damage here in Nova Scotia last Summer. Fried the rectifier in the Hornet, cooked the regulator and 2 inverters, blew out a whole bunch of stuff in the camp. Thank God, the PV's weren't hurt.
The strange thing is, it appears the bump came in on the utility mains and crossed over somehow in a bunch of places. Perhaps it was just induction, but the electronics destroyed, had the printed wiring on the circut boards vaporized and redeposited on the inside of the device cabinets. Pretty copper flash coating. The ceramic strain insulator where the mains come in, was exploded and the scorched bits all over the ground, yet no sign of scorching on the wood it was screwed into. As well as the phone wires burned off at the pole.
The place was filled with the stench of burned electrical stuff, but strangely, no fire.
I took the Horned down for the Summer, only enough wind here for it in Fall and Winter anyway and then there's no lightening.
Lightening can certainly discourage a person.
Wayne
Wayne

System2

Re: Close lightning. Too Close!

I suspect my damage was minimized by the arrestor at the pole. It bulged out. It took out the charge controller but not the inverter or hub com devices. ( Outback).You are right about that EMP. Man, I was right in it . Had my head 8 inches away from the main panel in the house ! I may have nerve damage! No kidding I was so keyed up that morning I was bouncing off the walls at work.I still have trouble sleeping.
The generator is a 99volt ametek DC motor with a 5 foot aluminum rotor.There are no electronics up on the pole. Just the generator and a 24 volt 30 amp circuit breaker. It must have survived too. I spent four years building this thing.I used a Mercotac rotary coupling too, pretty sweet way to get around the slipring problem. It looks like a factory unit. I used pvc for the body and even painted a lightning bolt on the tail. That must have attracted the strike LOL.
Four years in the build,10 milliseconds to destroy.
I like the idea of taking it down in the spring and summer. Not much in the way of wind unless it storms anyway. I rigged the pole to break down with a hydraulic cylinder. I think I'll just put her up in the winter. Good Idea.
Chuck

System2

Re: Close lightning. Too Close!

I've had very good success with grounding on my 65ft wind gen tower. I used two 10 ft grounding rods at the base and at each of the four supporting points that touches the ground then tied all of these five points together with copper braid wire under the ground. My solar tracker and wind tower has never been affected by lighting even though lightning bolts have hit the ground near them.

System2

Re: Close lightning. Too Close!

Here's a pic of my tower :-) http://putfile.com/pic.php?pic=10/28417075736.jpg&s=x10

System2

Re: Close lightning. Too Close!

WOW! What a beautiful site, both for wind and for the eye to behold.
You sure must be doing something right re lightening!
Wayne

niel

Re: Close lightning. Too Close!

nice job jack. glad to hear you did it up that well for grounding. you grounded a point that i have forgotten to mention in the past and that's the guy wires. you even tied them together underground, but i'd have used solid wire to do that as braid will rust away in time.