FAQ – Applications

We have surge suppression on the power and telco lines and a good grounding system, but still have outages and occasional failures. How do we know if it is lightning related?

Severe lightning will show physical damage evidence on components, traces and/or wires. Less severe lightning may still cause damage but leave no visible evidence. If the failure occurred during a lightning event, there is a high probability the failure was caused by the lightning.

We just reinforced our grounding system – it measured 5 ohms, maximum. Yet we still have problems. What’s going on and what can you do about it?

Unless regularly maintained, grounding systems will slowly degrade over time, principally due to corrosion. The conductivity of the soil may also change with seasonal weather patterns – wet soil is significantly more conductive than dry soil. The effectiveness of surge suppression will also degrade over time, subject to the frequency and severity of fault events. Prolonged commercial power faults or severe lightning will invariably defeat surge and grounding protection systems.

The circuit isolation protection of Lightning Shield is impervious to commercial power faults and all but direct lightning strikes. Equipment that is isolated from the path of fault current is fully protected.

Lightning Shield is wired to the primary AC service that is supplying all power supplies for the terminal equipment.

If there are multiple AC power sources, the Lightning Shield can be customized with multiple contactors to protect complex power configurations.