Campers in thunderstorms

Steved55

Senior Member
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T6 Guru
Have been in France the last couple of weeks and experienced a couple of violent thunderstorms. We were very close to a couple of lightning strikes and I assured my wife that a vehicle was the safest place to be because of the Faraday cage effect - I think it was Top Gear where they drove a car around under massive Van Der graaf generators which simulated lightning strikes?
However - it got me thinking in the night - how does a fibreglass pop top roof affect the cage effect?
Also, if on a mains hook up, isn't this effectively earthing the van body hence completely negating the effect?
Best advice anyone? It's looking very black again!
 
The thing to have in your mind is path - in a lightning strike the charge will take the most direct low resistance path.

Fun fact at the level of a camper the lighting strike will actually be going UP to meet the downcoming strike.

It's not really the Faraday Cage here, though the reason that they work is the same principle, it's that all the bodywork is electrically coupled so there is no reason for the charge to do anything other than flow through the metal, and the metal is a near perfect conductor so there will not be any voltage gradient. So at no point will YOU become a more conductive path.

At the energy involved rubber tyres won't make much of a difference, if the low current path is through the van body then the 6 inches of air is nothing to something opening a plasma channel kilometres long. Frankly neither will an EHU grounding.

I strongly doubt the pop top will make any difference to anybody in the van. Very possibly if you were in the poptop above the van body, but again unlikely.

BTW the reason lightning "conductors" work is not that they conduct a bolt to ground, they'd be instantly vaporised, but that with the sharp points at the top they allow the ground charge to conduct efficiently into the air so there is much less chance of an upward ground strike forming for the downstroke to find.

Your biggest risk in lightning is having your feet apart. Should a bolt hit the ground near you the resistance of the ground means your feet may then be many 100s of volts different and the current may take a path through you. It's why many sheep or cattle are killed as their feet are much further apart.

Best advice is stay indoors, if not keep feet together and try and take up the smallest space touching the ground.

What might be more at risk is your electronics from EMP. At sea we used to put phones and handheld radios in the yacht's oven as it was close to a Faraday Cage.
 
Many thanks - I can remember a story one of my college lecturers told about workers attending a fallen live power line and all hopping on one foot so they didn't get a shock from the potential gradient from the point of earthing!
 
Many thanks - I can remember a story one of my college lecturers told about workers attending a fallen live power line and all hopping on one foot so they didn't get a shock from the potential gradient from the point of earthing!
Sounds like a recipe for falling over and face-planting the power line. Doh!
 
I once spent an early evening in quite an amazing storm standing on the fire escape in the lee of a university building helping a colleague with lightning research by photographing bolts hitting the city buildings.

This was the days of 35mm SLRs so it was only later that week when we got the prints back (and celebrated that in something like 8 rolls of film we'd got 2 or 3 great images) that my colleague went a bit quiet.

When I asked them what was wrong thier reply was "do you notice how all the bolts are hitting buildings below us on the hillside while we were stood outside on the metal fire escape..."

Oh dear.
 
Some serious physics at work here.

Some quotes from college days

"Potential difference,"

"Least path of resistance,"

....

Just makes me imagine the potential difference of the clouds huge static charge with reference to ground earth...... then the spark gap being the path of least resistance..... ie a lighting conductor on top of a building with a sold copper bar down to ground and buried in the earth.


....



So id imagine a earth EHU grounded VW T6 would still act as a Faraday cage, but all grounding would be instantly vaporized in a strike with the enormous energy.... but by then you would have survived a direct strike.

...


As for the fibreglass roof..... not sure on that.


Though I'm sure there would be better , higher points that lighting would find a path to ground other than your pop top...
:mexican wave:
 
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