Weather Imagery

How exactly lightning forms is still open for debate. The most commonly accepted theory is that electrons are stripped off colliding ice particles caught in a thunderstorm’s updraft. Once these particles lose an electron, their net remaining charge becomes positive. These positively charged particles will rise high into the upper most part of the thunderstorm where they tend to collect. Conversely, other particles in the cloud acquire an electron after the collision and as a result, their net remaining charge is negative. The negatively charged particles tend to collect at the base of the cloud.

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When we had our house built, DR Horton installed the crappiest windows possible. To make matters worse, the windows were installed poorly and rain water leaked down through the walls causing quite a headache. I waited 6 months for them to come out and replace the windows the first time. Well, the second time they leaked I decided to take matters into my own hands. No, I didn’t take them to court. The money I would of spent in court fighting them to replace the crappy windows with the same crappy window was instead used to buy brand new windows. Top quality windows.

For the second test, he pulled out a 300 BTU thermal lamp to simulate the sun (the kind you would find in a bathroom to warm you up). He put a single pane window in front of the lamp and the BTU meter read 280. Virtually no change. He then put a double-pane window in front of the lamp and the meter dropped a bit further to 220. Then he put a triple-pane argon filled window and it dropped considerably to about 120 BTU’s. For the final test, he put the Champion Window in front of the heat lamp and the meter dropped to an amazing 40 BTU’s! I was really impressed. You could barely feel the heat through the window.

For those interested, the specifications on the windows were as follows: Double-pane, argon-filled, vinyl frame, double-glazed Low-E, 0.29 UV, 0.31 SHGC, 0.55 Visible Transmittance, 0.005 Air Infiltration. They also come with a lifetime warranty for anything that goes wrong. And I mean anything. If my son puts a baseball through the window, it’s covered. You only have to pay a $45 service fee, and that’s it.

The windows were a bit pricey. As an example (call them to set up an appointment and take measurements) our 42″x36″ double-slider cost about $1,300. They have specials going on all the time, especially in the winter right around January.

The windows are very well made. They use thick vinyl for solid construction and the interior portion of the frame is foam filled. Both the windows and the screen slide back and forth for easy cleaning and also eliminates the need to remove it. The windows themselves slide very smoothly in their tracks with very little effort. They roll on bearing wheels and don’t simply slide on a vinyl insert.

Since the windows are custom made, it took about 1 month before they were ready. The installers were very nice and did a very thorough job. It took them about 6 hours to install five windows which considering the amount of work involved, was actually pretty good. About half way through the installation, a representative from Champion Windows came by to make sure everything was going OK. We were very impressed.

It’s been about a week since the windows were installed and we have noticed a big difference in our family room. In the past, with the thermostat set at 68°F, the room would get to at most 68°F but would then quickly fall back down to 63°F or lower. With the new windows, the room stays at about 69°F and can hover around 73°F if the rest of the house needs heating. So we are seeing an increase of about 8°F.

A couple years ago I installed a furnace humidifier because the air in Colorado is extremely dry, especially when the cold winter air is heated to 68°F. When you heat cold dry air, the humidity level drops considerably. Our first solution was to run three small warm mist and cool mist humidifiers throughout the house which meant changing a lot of filters and re-filling with water. Even still, we would average about 11% humidity which meant every light switch, doorknob and button we touched produced a 1.21 gigawatt lightning bolt. That’s when I decided enough was enough and I needed something bigger. Either one of those big whole house humidifiers that looks like a small refrigerator and is a serious eye-sore or a furnace humidifier that is out of sight, out of mind. I chose the latter.

If you don’t have a accessory hook-up you can still install the humidifier, but you will need to do a little more work such as adding a transformer and wiring the humidifier in with the blower motor so the humidifier doesn’t spin all the time. This may also void any warranty you have on the furnace so its best to check with the manufacturer.

To install a furnace humidifier, you have to cut two hole in the duct work. One in the plenum and one in the cold air return as seen here. You will also need to tap into a cold water pipe for the water supply. Tapping into the cold water pipe was easy because they provided a little valve that clamps onto, and screws into the pipe. This was very easy and no tools were required. To cut holes in the sheet metal, you will need sheet metal clips. The humidifier manufacturer should provide a template to make the cutting easy with little to no measurements.

Since installing the Auto Flo 97, we have notice a huge difference in humidity and comfort level. Instead of averaging 11% humidity, we now average around 25%, but it did take about a week for the humidity levels to start increasing. This seems to be a perfect amount because we no longer get shocked when touching light switches, doorknobs or buttons on electrical equipment. The comfort level is so much nicer we really feel a difference between a friends house that doesn’t have one and our house. We also have installed a humidistat to control the amount of moisture entering the system. We don’t want too much because the moisture will start condensing on the cold windows.

The best way to answer this is to explain the concept behind a lightning rod, the unpredictability of a lightning strike and what happens when the lightning hits the lightning rod. Lightning rods do not attract lightning until it is very close to the rod, and the best way to explain this is probably through an example.

A simple lightning rod is nothing more than a conductive piece of metal about 3 feet in length that sits atop the highest point on a house. Attached to this piece of metal is a thick copper wire that runs down the side of the house and attaches to a pipe which is driven several feet into the earth. That’s it.

A lightning bolt is far more complex and the kind of lightning we are worried about is called a cloud-to-ground strike which starts high in the clouds. On average a cloud-to-ground lightning bolt produces about 1,000,000 kW or about 50,000 amps, which is a lot! So much that it instantly vaporizes any moisture and creates a steam explosion that’s capable of exploding concrete, blowing out a chunk of wall, or melting just about anything. The interesting thing about lightning is it doesn’t know what it’s going to strike when it first starts to form. As more and more positive charge builds on the ground beneath the storm, more and more negative charge builds in the lower part of the cloud. As the charge continues to build, so does the attraction between the positively and negatively charged particles. The only thing stopping the electric current from flowing is air, which happens to be a very good insulator. This allows an immense amount of charge to build up.

As the charge builds, the air between the cloud and the ground starts to ionize (this part is invisible). This is done in small little paths, step-by-step, zig-zagging all about (this is why lightning looks the way it does and isn’t a straight line). Once it gets to within 100′ of the ground something weird happens. Objects on the ground begin throwing up “streamers”. These are like little fingers that shoot upwards about 50 feet. The first streamer to touch a step leader coming down from the cloud above will complete the circuit and a huge surge of electricity will flow (this is the part we see as lightning). Understanding that lightning doesn’t know at 50,000 feet what it’s going to strike is key. Just because you have a lightning rod, doesn’t mean it will attract lightning. It only improves your odds if a lightning bolt is going to strike within a 100 feet or so of your house.

Now, say the lightning bolt is making its way down to the ground and it’s heading right for your house. Your rooftop, satellite dish or a large tree (or maybe all three) throw up a streamer. If the streamer from the satellite dish or your roof makes contact with one of the ionization channels first, well, that’s bad. That means the lightning bolt is going to hit your house and cause a great amount of damage. But, if you did have a lightning rod at the highest point on your roof and it created a bigger streamer than your rooftop, satellite dish or tree, then the odds of it striking the rod are greater. Therefore, you would have decreased the odds of it striking something you didn’t want it to. If the lightning rod is struck, the electric current would pass through the metal rod, down through the copper wire and into the Earth. This is what you want! Your house (and your wallet) would not suffer any damage and life goes on as normal.

So, the lightning rod attached to your roof doesn’t really attract the lightning any more so than your roof or satellite dish do. If the lightning is close enough, your house was going to be hit anyway. But assuming you do have a lightning rod, the odds of lightning striking the rod instead of some other part of your house are increased, especially if the lightning rod is at the highest point of you house such that the ionization path reaches it first.

Other Lightning Myths

• Is Ball Lightning Real?
• Can Lightning Crash an Airplane?
• Can Lightning Be Used As a Source of Power?
• Can Lightning Strike the Same Place Twice?
• Do Car Tires Protect Me From Lightning?
• Can Lightning Strike Me Inside My House?

The idea of harnessing a lightning bolt and using the electricity to supplement our power grid has been thought up many times in the past. But knowing when and where lightning will strike, capturing the lightning bolt, finding the right materials that could withstand the sudden surge of electricity and pushing it onto the electrical grid are not easy obstacles to overcome. The amount of power is quiet immense … or is it?

A typical lightning bolt produces about 10,000 amps but some bolts, such as the one that struck the Apollo spacecraft upon liftoff in the 60′s, have measured well over 100,000 amps. Nowadays, there are large capacitors and batteries which could store the huge amounts of electricity a lightning bolt creates, but would it be practical to try and harness it? Surprisingly, no. There is very little power in a lightning bolt when you compare it to how much power we really use in our homes and cities.

There’s no question thunderstorms generate a tremendous amount of electricity. Ironically, when you convert a lightning bolt into watts, an even larger number is produced. But when you convert the lightning into kilowatt-hours (the unit used to measure the power we use in our homes) it’s rather insignificant. In fact, the average lightning bolt contains about 250 kilowatt-hours of electricity. However, the average household uses anywhere from 500 kilowatt-hours to 1500 kilowatt-hours of electricity per month. So one average lightning bolt won’t even power the average home for half a month let alone a small town or a large city. In addition, there are a few problems with trying to harness and use the electricity generated by a lightning bolt.

While capacitors today can store huge amounts of electricity, most aren’t charged in about 0.2 msec, the time it takes for a lightning bolt to discharge its 1,000,000 kilo-volts of electricity. Conversely, these large capacitors are usually charged “slowly” and then quickly discharged in specialized applications (particle accelerators, lasers, rail guns, etc). If you only captured a portion of the electricity produced by a lightning bolt, then you would need more hits on a collection tower to make up the difference.

Taking this into consideration, one tower isn’t going to cut it. Even if it’s 100 feet tall, that doesn’t guarantee a lightning bolt is going to hit it. You would need many towers stretching 1000 feet or higher spread over a very large area that sees many thunderstorms each year to increase the odds of capturing a lightning strike. Florida would be the most likely location for such a lightning farm. Florida averages the most lightning strikes each year with about 10 strikes per kilometer per year. So, if you have a bunch of towers set up in a 1 kilometer area and these towers were able to attract all 10 lightning strikes for the entire year, you would produce enough electricity to power 2 homes for a month. As you can see … it’s simply not worth it which is why no one has ever tried to commercialize lightning as a source of electricity.

However, one company thinks they may have found a way to harvest lightning for use on the electrical grid. You can read about them at http://www.alternateenergyholdings.com/