Yeah, I know, I won’t let it go. About every three months I write yet another article like this one, just begging you to make sure the stuff on your roof is properly grounded. You think it’s any fun for me either? Look, do me a favor and read the article and I’ll try to have a better attitude next time.
I’ve said it before, grounding is the most important thing you’re not doing. It protects you, your home, and everything in it. Ye, most of us don’t do it, because it doesn’t actually help us get better TV, satellite, or cellular reception. We aim the antenna and then we think we’re done. You know who you are, and you know you’ve done this.
Would this help?
Maybe it would help a little bit if I explained what grounding does. Let’s start with a misconception. People think of a lightning strike as coming down from the sky. That’s not really true. When clouds rub together, they create static electricity, just the same way your shoes generate static in a dry room with a carpet. When the electrical field is strong enough, a bolt of lightning shoots upward to connect to it. I know it doesn’t look like that. I understand. But hey, this is the science involved here. It’s not my fault.
This massive bolt of electricity is going to connect to the sky at the easiest possible point. Often times that’s the highest point it can reach, which may be a tree, but is more likely to be the highest point in your house. If there’s a point on your house that’s made of metal, the lightning will probably shoot up from there, even if it’s not the absolute highest point. For most of us, that’s a TV antenna, cellular antenna, or satellite dish.
By the way…
Even if your antenna is sheathed in plastic, there’s still a metal part inside. Antennas are always made of metal, even when they don’t look like it, and they always need to be grounded.
You can’t really prevent lightning, and you can’t really control it. But what you can do is try to guide it. That means creating a really attractive path from ground level to your roof that doesn’t go into your home. We start with copper wire attached to a water pipe, breaker box, or something else that we know is grounded. You’ll have to consult local ordinances, because they’re all different. The most important thing is making sure there’s a copper wire that somehow, some way, touches the actual planet, not just your house or something.
Then, you use a ground block to let that copper wire connect to your coaxial cable, so electricity is directed to the grounding wire and not into your home. Coaxial cables are great ways for electricity to flow, after all that’s how they’re designed. They can also be lethal death-rockets if you don’t give excess electricity somewhere to escape to. That’s why the ground block is so important. It directs electricity to the ground wire while letting signals go into the house. Pretty impressive for something that doesn’t cost a lot.
There’s not a lot more to it than that. Proper grounding means going to every antenna, every dish, everything metal on your house and making sure it’s connected to the actual dirt somewhere. We have a whole white paper to tell you how you can do it, and it’s not even that hard.
Now, before one of the commenters says it…
I’m totally aware that a thin bit of copper isn’t going to totally shield you from a massive lightning strike. If your home does get hit by lightning, the chances are there’s going to be some damage. But grounding wires can deal with smaller strikes and they can stop bigger strikes from causing deadly house fires. The bottom line is that you are absolutely safer when you ground your devices than when you don’t. There’s no doubt about that.
So, look. you know I’m going to write another one of these articles in about three months. If you’re a longtime reader you’ve seen several of them. I also know that for a lot of our readers, going outside and getting up on the roof could be just as risky as a lightning strike. So don’t risk your life if it’s snowy and icy, but if you live somewhere a little further south, please take the time to properly ground your equipment. If you think you’ve grounded everything, check the connections and make sure the wire actually connects to something. Do a little research and who knows, it could actually save your life.
In the meantime…
Get the grounding stuff done before it starts to snow. Get the parts you need by shopping at Solid Signal. If you have questions, call us at [email protected] or by filling out the form below.
I live in an old house (late fifties) with no 3-prong outlets. Short of a total re-wire of the house, which is not possible, how am I supposed to accomplish this? The electricians I’ve asked about running separate ground wires to the boxes have recoiled in horror.
There’s nothing outside to ground. The cable drop has a ground but I can’t see allowing that to ground the whole house.
Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but a rewire really is the only way.
It depends on what you want to do. If all you want to do is ground the coax cable then have a ground rod, or two, installed near the coax entrance point and ground it there. In fact, the people who installed your cable or sat dish probably did this anyway, go out and take a look to see if a connector block and ground wire were attached to the block, which would mean they also put a ground rod in to run that ground wire to. If this was NOT done then call them back and make them do it otherwise I guess you could always sue them if lighting does strike through their coax into your house 😉
But seriously it would be better to at least bring a ground connection in with the AC to your main electrical panel. You do not have to run it to every outlet but bringing it in would at least have it there for future upgrades. If you decide to redo your kitchen or bathroom you will probably be required to install GFCI outlets on any outlet near water and these protection outlets require a ground connection.
Lightning goes from ground to cloud, from cloud to ground, and from cloud to cloud depending on where the positive and negative charges are. One would think that since electrons are the easiest to move that if the negative charge is in the cloud and the positive charge is in the ground it strikes from cloud to ground, however this is a very simplistic view of what is really happening, for a more complete understanding, description, of what really happens read the reference link I’ve provided below.
ref: .Lightning FAQ
“But what you can do is try to guide it” –
not so much unless you have some very serious grounding and guides!
Which costs thousands of dollars. No, what we really want to do is to
prevent a strike by bleeding off the charge around our houses, antennas,
etc. Grounding rods are NOT there to direct the flow of electricity
during a lightning strike, they are there to bleed off excess charge
around the house before it builds up enough to attract a strike. The whole reason for points on the rods on top of houses and barns is to allow electrons to gather there and be taken away by a breeze so they do not build up enough to cause a strike..