This Cost Us THOUSANDS - Lightning Destroys DIY Off-Grid Solar System

:videocall:MAKE SURE TO WATCH THE ORIGINAL INSTALL VIDEO: https://youtu.be/vnjMQLhp6LE ⚡SOLAR WIRING DIAGRAM: tinyshinyhome.com/off-grid-solar-wiring-diagram

Anyone who has lost a refrigerator, a computer, or other tech due to lightning feels your pain.

ANYONE who thinks they want to live off the grid needs to watch your videos. You share your wins & loses and educate everyone on what worked (or didn't) , why & what happened , and how you fixed it. Even if the only thing someone wants to do is raise chickens (much more involved than city folk think) they should watch your stuff. People don't really understand how much work and knowledge is involved in this lifestyle, then add to it that you are living out West in the high desert...you guys have my respect and admiration. Thank you for sharing your life with us :-)

Johnathon - We had a bad ground issue in the past. Since we did not use our gray water, I put ground rods next to the gray line disposal ditch which gave us plenty of moisture for the soil. The septic leach field was also suggested but it was too far from the house.

A little hint... Not if, but when you build the grounding grid, before you interconnect the rods, measure the resistance between each pair of rods (through the ground, that is)! Do that already between the first two rods. If not satisfactory, add more rods. You might even try water jet drilling with some salt added to the drilling water. Anyway, consider that a lightning strike can be 100,000 amperes , or more. By Ohm's law, it would generate 10,000 V on just a 0.1 ohm grounding resistance. See where this leads you: Even a grounding grid can still be poor, if the soil is dry.

Hi Jonathan! I design utility-scale solar, wind, and battery energy storage systems as an electrical engineer. We regularly run computational electromagnetic grounding studies to determine ground fault current withstand. A common solution technique involves installing Ground Enhancing Material (GEM) around your horizontal and vertical electrodes to improve the conductivity of the soil when site conditions are less than ideal. This seems to be a nice solution for you, as it appears you are recycling rainwater and trying to save any you can collect! This solution method is more effective from a cost, protection, and safety perspective when analyzed against additional copper. The impedance of your ground system to remote Earth is entirely dependent upon geometric and material properties.

I completely feel for you. Our house was struck by lightening on Xmas Day 2015. Besides a large hole in our tiled roof, it fried just about every electrical appliance inside the house, and also our Solar Invertor, automatic garage doors, and our back to base security alarm system. It split apart our surge protector power boards as well. Thank goodness we were fully insured, however, the excess was 1000s. This however, was a small price to pay for a bill which was in excess of $40,000 in replacements (covered by the House and Contents Insurance). I hope and pray it does not happen to you again.

You need to run #4 copper ground wire to each ground rod in your system to bond all ground rods together. More ground rods do nothing to help you. Adding SPDs definitely helps but your are placing all of nearby lightning strike induced earth current surge gradient stress on SPDs without bonding everything via low resistance ground bond. This is the main flaw in your setup - not bonding all your ground rods. Earth soil acts as distributed resistor and ground rods at different locations act as resistor taps bringing this voltage gradient into your electrical devices. Look up lightning strike ground potential rise.

Thanks for talking about this guys! The Midnight SPDs sound like the way to go! Thanks for explaining how to install them. Great idea to protect your generator too! Wow, I had no idea that happened to you guys! That must have been terrible. We had a lightning strike behind our garage. Our Net Gear modem was plugged in at an outlet in the garage and it fried. Wow, adding more grounding support because of your dry sandy soil! So sorry you can't get any insurance for your system. You definitely are doing the most you can to protect your system! Thanks for this video Jonathan! On screen shot, pesky T-Rex at 3:07! Our house uses our water main as the grounding rod. I see a fat copper wire going from our breaker box to the hot water pipe coming out of our water heater. Then more copper wire goes to the cold water pipe as the inlet to the water heater. So we got a new water softening system installed and it is connected in with PVC connections. I asked the guy about the grounding and he didn't know what I was talking about. I had to buy some copper wire and spiked ground connectors to ground above that installation to get over to our water main again. I'm so glad I noticed! He "broke" our grounding system by isolating the water softener system with PVC connectors. PVC doesn't conduct electricity! The side of our house with the breaker box has a deck and then pavement between it and the mast where our power comes into the house. Not really any good spots to put grounding rods. So far so good.

As for ground rods in dry soil or rocky soil, we tend to dig down about four feet and add a 6” diameter plastic pipe to the "well". We drive an eight foot ground rod down in the middle of the pipe, connect a very heavy ground wire and copper strap to the rod and run those to your power system. You can also connect heavy copper ground lines spreading out as radials from the ground rod buried at least two feet u dear ground. Next backfill the ground well with a layer of clay on the bottom if possible followed by some dirt with peat moss for about a foot followed by some gravel. At this point get about two cups of coarse salt and mix with five gallons of water, mix well and pour it into the plastic pipe well. This should help saturate the earth below ground level and create a more conductive path for the lightning strike. If you have a lot of storms hitting during your monsoon season, place a few plastic barrels adjacent to gather rain water. You can use this rain water to drip feed the well to keep it moist. Do not add any additional salt to the system.

Jonathan, you are the master of all of the electrical things! I’m sorry that happened to you guys, but it’s also awesome that you used a bad situation to teach others how to prevent that as much as possible. Love you all, and have a blessed weekend! ❤

Most relevant video for me. In the next week, I’m redoing some parts of my system as I move it from temporary to more permanent, if there is such a thing. You are also right about how hard it is to DIY. It is simple to connect component together, but learning everything to deal with problems is difficult and you can never learn enough.

So sorry! What a budget buster!! I am so glad you had the ability to fix it quickly. I accidently ended up on your website, and was quite impressed. You offer so many plans that many people really need. But nobody will understand all the struggles, and learning the hard way you and family have experienced. When we watch your YouTube videos, we put your video on all our devices, including commercials and thumbs up; our way of helping a little.

I live in SWFL. I put midnite solar spds at my combiner boxes and at my charge controllers. It may be overkill but lightning scares me to death. When a storm comes and I am home I even shut off my charge controller breakers. The system has been running since 2008 and I haven't lost anything to lightning yet.

I just LOVE your honesty!!!! So very refreshing. Nothing is always perfect and you not only admit it, you also advise us on how to prepare and prevent what’s happened to you!!! Thank you for just being real and kind as always!!!! 💕

I appreciate you sharing the information, as more and more of us make solar a part of our energy life.

The best Earth ground in that soil would be the well casing . I'm usually grounding for RF and Lightning with good earth I use a minimum of 3 8ft ground rods 12ft apart connected with #4 wire connected with Cadwelds all of it at least 1ft deep .

Hi there, if you put your lightning rods where your roof rain run off goes into the ground or your water trenches. That should be more moist than most other areas. Just a suggestion.

I love your humility. Making a mistake and asking “What can we learn from this?” is exactly the attitude I want my kids to learn.

Your made for this.. keep on keeping on my friends. Still got a smile as well.. money comes and goes.. this life of yours is priceles. Much love and respect to you all