wired lightning

[WaYSidE]

as, DCC block occupation wiring is nearly finished, as i look around the entire room and find i am 360 surrounded by wires, i think i run an earth (unattached to dcc) up the outside wall of house to stop near height of the window.  but away from window,i dont know enough about electrics, but if i dont attract it, by installing earth , if it does hit, at least it has an outside route to ground, as opposed to the sockets

if i dont connect it to anything, bar the wall, i can expect lightning to hit there before this monster model rail of a lightning collector goes bang. i live in a lightning active area in uplands, often when fork lightning down the valley, we have low cloud fill with sheet lightning. i have seen everything electric blue in misty clouds, house, cars trees, people covered in glow.  maybe i take up origami instead.

[DiveController]

Isn't the model indoors? Sounds like the model (which might pull a fair few amps especially on DCC) just needs a quality surge protector and and ARC protected circuit breaker. The house need a lightning conductor with a large ground pad if anything. Even then it won't stop a lightning strike hitting your roof and setting fire to that (happened to a lovely property near me)  but there is only so much you can do. Not an electrician so maybe you might ask some advice there unless there is a duly qualified master electrician on the forum (which there might)

[Broithe]

Mmm, "lightning conductors" have several modes of operation. One is to reduce the attractiveness of the structure to being struck in the first place, and then to protect it to some extent, if that strategy fails and it is struck.

There is no completely satisfactory solution to it. 

If your 'discharge' facility, aimed at reducing your chance of being struck, is actually struck, then the resulting current will be enormous. A glance at the lightning protection on large buildings, etc, will reveal the size of the conductors that are used. They are that size in order to survive being struck (hopefully!). Anything at all will suffice for the discharge situation, but, if that is not adequate to avoid a strike, then the pulse can vaporise the conductor, but still leave an ionised path to (the real) earth - resulting in some damage and injury from flying debris and a risk of fire.

The section in Gulliver's Travels about the dispute over whether to eat boiled eggs from the big end or the little end is a joke about the arguments over the preferred shape of early lightning conductors.

When i had a real job, we made circuit breakers which, generally being of a 'spiky' shape and located in exposed outdoor substations, were frequent targets for lightning strikes. We used 1" x 1/4" copper strip to conduct the energy to the ground mesh. It was necessary, for stuff exported to some countries to camouflage the copper strips by scraping rust onto them from exposed steel plates, whilst they were covered in silvery wet paint, to make them look like steel strips - or they would be removed within days and turned into jewellery by the local population...