Is 45A cooker wire going to do much as a quick google suggests the current in a lightning strike is orders of magnitude higher than that, any "normal" cable is going to get burnt out if it takes the current from a strike.

I don't know. I know the currents involved might be thousands of Amps, but it's only for a very brief duration.

Interestingly, when my aerial(s) were struck, only one of them was slightly fried - you might have expected all the down-leads to have caught fire, or vapourised - but they didn't.

No doubt there's a standard somewhere, that says what a Lightning Conductor should be connected to.

Normally lightning conductor "wire" is a strip of rather thick copper attached to the outside of the building. It tends to go green.

The idea being that insulations is unnecessary for a ground and if it does get hit it won't need replacing, especially as lightning does strike twice, usually a couple ms after the first one.

Er that's wrong physics and known not to be true for hundreds of years now. Benjamin Franklin the originator of this incorrect theory retracted it himself.

Basically a lightning conductor puts the top of the conductor at the same potential as the ground. The lightning is looking for the lowest resistance route to the ground (well actually it's the other way around but still the same). Being higher up makes the route from the cloud to the ground via your lightning conductor the lowest resistance (or more correctly impedance) route to ground and electricity (Kirchhoff's circuit laws) always takes the lowest impedance route to ground.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightning_rod

The fundamental principle used in lightning protections systems is to provide a sufficiently low impedance path for the lightning to travel through to reach ground without damaging the building.

Edited by jabuzzard (Thu 03-Oct-19 13:44:42)

.... and that�s the issue, the enormous unpredictability of lightning.

Went to a property where the strike had been to the �swan neck� bracket holding the drop wire on the eaves. Everything electrical was borked in the house. About every two metres along the span the copper pair had �blown� out of the drop wire. The DP block at the top of the pole had vaporised, and every other house attached to the DP had at least some form of damage, phones and routers gone, most needed a new NTE.