October 21, 2020 Super lot going on, even though it was overcast and a bit gloomy, it was quite a day! Smokestack finished up today, amazingly you hardly notice the “air terminals”, and installing the grounding plates. The last little project was putting up the flagpole, cabling it with a lightning rod on top, and raising the flag we found at the house. Really, sort of an emotional day overall, and we felt proud to be flying the American flag on our tower.
There were two parts to installing the rods for the main house, running the cable inside of course, and then one guy on top of the ridge drilling down through the roof, and one on the inside attaching the cable. You wouldn’t catch me doing either part! Here is Bill crawling along on the rafters, and below if you look carefully you can see the air terminals on the ridgeline and also on the side of the tower along the roof edge. The metal railings on the deck and top of the tower actually act as the lightning rods, and are directly cabled into the system.
Digging around here is definitely not fun… the cable leads away from the house to a buried grounding plate that discharges the strike.
When all 5 grounds plates and rod were done and covered, Bill spray painted them for me to take photos, so we could find them (or avoid them!) as needed in the future. (Remember when we didn’t have cell phones with cameras, or even digital cameras? I think I got my first digital camera in 2000…)
Finally, the last event of the day was installing the flagpole, cabling it with an air terminal and flying the flag! I had bought the sturdiest steel flagpole I could find on the internet – where can you actually go during a pandemic to look at 12′ flagpoles that can withstand 45 mph winds? Bill was really great about making it work… the flagpole fit almost perfectly into one of the steel railing posts, which made it as sturdy as it was going to get, and looking good too. He bolted on the cable and terminal (and put on the goofy gold rubber ball and cord for the flag) before installing it, so he was able to set it up beautifully. Thanks, Bill! (they even put a photo of it on their website :-))
Randall Richter
Looks great….sort of like grounding a boat! Great progress!