High Copper Prices Affect Lightning Protection
Comment posted on the Lightning Protection Technical Forum: If you're on the purchasing end of the business, be prepared to pay considerably more for your buss bars, ground wire and any other product using copper. Yesterday alone the price of copper went up 6%. Analogous to fuel, it's not likely to come down. During the past month, the price of copper has increased more than 30%. This year it has climbed a staggering 62% See: http://www.wirelessestimator.com/breaking_news.cfm
Response by Moderator: Commodity prices are usually of no interest to our technical forum. This case, however, is important as it effects the relative cost of conventional versus non-conventional lightning protection systems. As most readers are aware, the conventional Franklin rod systems use large quantities of copper and hence their cost is sensitive to the price of this commodity.
Of course, the total cost of a system includes both the materials and the labour for the installation. The latter component is not rising as fast, thus limiting the overall increase in cost of the system. However, with such sharp increase in cost of materials, the overall increase in cost of the system will still be substantial.
The position of the scientific community at large is established regarding the invalidity of the claims behind non-conventional lightning protection systems. The said rejection covers the following:
a) Lightning elimination devices/Charge Transfer Systems (CTS),
b) Early Streamer Emission (ESE) lightning rods regardless of whatever deceptive name is used to describe them, and,
c) The Collection Volume Method (CVM) which some vendors use to justify the reduction in number of air terminals compared to what is required by the electrogeometric model/Rolling Sphere Method.
Despite rejection by the scientific community, the vendors of ESE and CTS systems have succeeded in selling their gadgets to thousand of people. The victims are not limited to laymen, architects and non-electrical engineers, but also include some generalist electrical engineers who lack knowledge in this specialized field, thus making junk science appear plausible to them.
Unfortunately, the power of deception of ESE and CTS vendors will be aided by the rising cost of copper. Persons who know the fact are advised to consider the following:
1) Lightning protection is a form of insurance: you incur the cost of a protection system to avoid the much higher cost of replacing or repairing the building when it gets damaged or burned as a consequence of a lightning strike. Since the cost of repair and replacement is also increasing with rise in cost of material and labour, the increase in cost of the lightning protection system can still be justified.
2) The provision of lightning protection is not mandatory. If the justification for providing lightning protection for a given building is marginal because of the low keraunic level and/or the other risk assessment factors as given in NFPA Standard 780, then perhaps you should opt for not providing lightning protection at time of construction. When copper prices drop in the future, a lightning protection system can then be added. Of course, it would facilitate matters in this case if the original design made provision for future retrofitting.
3) It would be a folly of a person to let the increase in cost of a conventional system persuade him to use a non-effective system instead. For it is no economy to pay, say, 70% of the price to get 10% of the protection. It would be better for the user in such a case to use available budget to provide full conventional protection for the more important part of his building, and leave the rest of the work for a future date. If the project includes several buildings, then the budget could be used to provide full protection to one or more of these buildings and leave the rest to be retrofitted later.
By the way, the wirelessestimator.com web site includes lots of eye-opening news regarding safety of tower workers. Also, many of our readers will find the October 28, 2005 article by Mr. Curtis R. Stidham to be of interest. This is entitled: "Grounding for lightning protection systems more than just low grounding resistance". Reference 2 of that article was published in the Proceedings of the 1992 International Aerospace and Ground Conference on Lightning and Static Electricity, Atlantic City, New Jersey, USA, paper no.67, 12 pages. Copies are available upon request from:
Abdul M. Mousa, Ph.D., P. Eng., Fellow IEEE Co-moderator
Correspondence obtained from the Lightning Protection forum which discusses Lightning and Power Quality issues http://groups.yahoo.com/group/LightningProtection.
