Should we install a lightning protection system?
Well, there was a lightning strike just a few hundred feet from my house last week, so I looked into it… According to the National Lightning Safety Institute, the most lightning-prone places in the whole of the United States get not much more than about 10 strikes per square km per year. So if you lived in such a place, and your house hypothetically takes up 1000 square metres in lightning footprint area because of its electrically attractive stature, you’d have a 1% per year chance of it getting hit. Over 50 years, then, it’d have about a 48% chance of getting hit, that’d be my guess for the worst case. More likely your chances of a direct hit would be less than that, but apparently there are 256000 insurance claims for residential lightning damage each year in the US, so it’s not all that uncommon. The average claim is less than $4300. .
