Lightning Water Well

A lightning strike is a violent event, anything can happen....

Thank you for those words of wisdom!

I must be getting old I can't find a Mork "sarcasm" meme.

I can attest to what SE posted. We had a strike earlier this year. Could not find the point of the strike but the results were obvious. It came through the low voltage electrical system. Took out the garage door openers control on both my unit and my neighbors. Took out the cable modem. Took out the ethernet port on the wifi router and the computer but not the printer. Killed the doorbell and both wired smoke alarms.

Everything else was just fine.

Go Figure.

Is there any way to protect the pump?

Maybe the insurer is willing to pay for the extra protection you seek...If not, I would just have the tree removed...and add a little extra bulk to the service ground...

Tree is history, unfortunately.

Also got rid of satellite dish and related TV service.

All electronic devices are now behind 2000kVa UPS's.

<...200kVA ups...> is a lot bigger than can be supported on a domestic supply, which is the order of a factor of 8 smaller!

Er, actually 2000kVA and 80 times. Oooops!

The question is how much protection is cost effective, there is always a trade-off...how much trouble and expense are you willing to invest in protecting this equipment, how critical is the application + cost of replacement - lifetime probability of lightning strikes that disable the equipment + cost of protection....

http://www.sumteremc.com/content/lightning-protection#:~:text=Connect%20a%20grounding%20lead%20to,significant%20distance%20from%20the%20building.

You don't say how many times that "particular tree" has been hit by lightning.

You don't say how big your property is.

You don't say how much you are willing to spend to protect your water pump; however, if you are willing to spend the money, you might try a Faraday Cage with a field of ground radials to reduce the earth-ground resistance to near zero.

The cage should be a minimum of 2 inch thick wall tubing. Do not use Galvanized pipe. The ground radials should be, at least, #4, and as long as you can afford.

The radials must be brazed to the tubing; otherwise, the connections will corrode and cause the resistance to rise.

I recommend that you research grounding and bonding on the internet, either draw up, or have a set of plans drawn by an Engineer, to be submitted to your planning agency. You'r3e going to want this approval for your insurance company.

no, there is NO way to protect the pump. no matter what anyone tells you.

surge protectors do not work for a lightning strike, ok i take that back, they CAN work if the lightning hits the line a mile away and sends a surge of much lower energy than the strike itself, much lower. my house or the pole next to it has been hit 4 times in 30 yrs. first 10 it was hit 3 times and then when the trees became taller than the house (i think the trees dissipate the static buildup before it gets to the point of an arc), i have not been hit until two yrs ago when the top of my electric pole got smacked. blew the insulators to pieces and shattered the car windows (among electrical things). one time there was a strike near my home, it energized the telephone line, which blew out my modem and entered the electrical system in the house and fried other electronic items (seems like the electric eyes on the garage door are susceptible as they go every time). as someone else said, 100,000 amps.. there is nothing to protect from that except mother earth.

you can "help" protect your equipment by grounding everything as much as possible. i have a metal shop, i have two grounding straps on each end of the building. long copper poles (8') need to be put into the ground. grounding is your best insurance, maybe plant more trees.

Does it really matter?

Or did it go from the ground, through the water to the pump and on to the electrical supply. All you can say was it got into the water well pump circuit.

We installed a number of surge diverters that consisted of an enclosure, two 100KA MOV diverter blocks in a Pi configuration with an air cored inductor which supplied the 240V to a "protected system". The second diverter was paralleled with an AC capacitor

Did they work, yes, did they fail under lightning strikes, yes, did the "protected system" remain protected from harm, sometimes! Nothing can be guaranteed with lightning except that it will surprise you!

In a previous life I worked with surge diverters in substations and it was well documented that after a surge had been diverted the voltage impressed across the system rose at the rate of 70KV per foot on 11KV transformers primary so that is why the lightning arrester is mounted right next to the bushing and connected to it with a very short straight wire, no pigtail for that forms an air cored coil.

A case in point. There was a very large, 40m 1.2m dia Hoop pine in the paddock 150m from the house and 20m from an underground telephone cable. The tree was struck, the phone line and accessories were fried and a light switch in a shed was turned to plastic confetti. The only common denominator was the earth.

We also have a stand of "protected Trees" on an ironstone hill side and every storm that comes through takes great pleasure in swatting the growing ones and from the farm shed the trees can be watched lighting up and turning to wood chips.

Lightning is a stubborn beast and follows whatever path it wishes no the one designed by man for protection. So lightning must be female mustn't it?

Electricity will take all available paths. Your well was one of them.

I recall an instance where lightning struck nearby a house,and the house had an intricate pattern in the wall paper,outlined in metallic foil.

The strike followed the pattern,and vaporized all of the foil pattern in the paper,but left everything else untouched;Didn't even scorch the paper around the foil.

Go figure!

I suspect the problem was more EMP related than what path the current took. Significant induced current in devices near the nanosecond magnetic field created by the lightening strike can generate a transient voltage that will exceed any protection device capability as well as exceed insulation dielectric rating . While surge protectors are important it becomes an expensive proposition to protect power circuits like well pumps. I've installed transient suppression on instrumentation at the transducer and at the equipment it's connected to and have still had devices damaged. The area I live in isn't prone to much lightning and most is of the sheet-lightning variety but in one instance a strike to a tree a few feet from a house in our area blew out, literally, the power outlets throughout the house; by that I mean some the outlets were hanging on their wires out of the box with significant flash burns in the outlet plastic body. Needless to say appliances didn't fare well either. I was really surprised and it impressed me on how much damage lightning can do even if it's not a direct strike.

Than all of you for your input! Have you ever heard of grounding a tree?

It would be interesting to see a " map " of how the energy irradiated from the point of contact at the tree to the distribution area. Maybe se can provide that.

I had a customer once I was at his house and he showed me a tree on the side of the house that had been struck by lightning just the day before, well it was a bizarre sight, the trees roots that were growing just below the surface had exploded out of the ground all around the tree, and the tree had lost several branches but was still standing mostly intact, there was potholes all around the tree where the large roots were some 10 to 12 ft away and some closer, the lightning had entered the house and caused his computer screen to iridesce but you could still see what was on the screen and the computer was still working...I don't remember all the little damages there were, but it was really hit or miss...I had one customer had their A/C condenser unit hit and it reversed the polarity of both the fan motor and the compressor...I knew a guy once he had been hit by lightning and it killed every hair cell on his body and burned a hole through his watch...anything can happen when you let that much electrical energy loose, it's unpredictable.....mostly what you protect from is near misses, a direct hit and all bets are off....

Here's a tree that was struck, you can see the pattern in the ground probably from the root growth...

This guy was struck, it left burn pattern...

Here's a Walnut tree section that was struck by lightning...

Lightning struck this pin on the green...

Chimney strike...

Pretty cool shot here....

Those were some cool pictures thank you!

Here is an interesting link to global lightning strikes,almost in real time...a 2sec delay:

http://www.lightningmaps.org/?lang=en#m=oss;t=3;s=0;o=0;b=0.00;ts=0;y=29.0754;x=-35.6836;z=2;d=8;dl=4;dc=0;

This is what lightning rods are for. If you are concerned, put one up, run a ground wire and install a really good earth ground and let the weather have it's fun. Look up the EPRA site and look through their information on lightning strikes, results and protection. You can't protect for everything, but you can put in a basic protection system that will provide an easier path to ground than your well and supply power lines.

My Dad used to sell submersible well pumps. Lightning was the biggest failure mode for the pumps right after old age. Most manufacturers add spark gaps right at the pump and some offer protection for the control boxes in the house but, as SE said, lightning is a comprised of a huge amount of energy and anything can happen.

As far as direction, it's impossible to say. Do your water lines and the electrical supply to the pump go near the tree?

The latest version of British Standard 7671 contains a protocol for determining whether surge protection is to be installed on the incoming supply to any electrical installation. It is a developing practice though, with all regulations, it is not retrospective.

The Original Poster might take its principles into account in the restoration and repair of the equipment in question, perhaps.