Let's say there is a lightning strike on a nearby power line and the excessive voltage/current makes it to your house. I often read that grounding rods are there to protect against surges like lightning. But if it is coming in through your wires, unless you have a surge protector redirecting it directly to ground (and thus the rods), wouldn't it first go through the hot wires and the entire circuit/appliances/electronics before returning to the panel and then to the ground rods? Maybe someone can explain the path in this example, lightning going through and into the ground rods with and without a whole home surge protector in place.
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The neutral or ground is the top wire on the pole.
The lightning also has a very low impedance path from a hot wire to neutral - the utility's transformer. For how transformers deliver power to houses, see this. Now, everybody thinks of a transformer as a thing that supplies power, not passes power. But it's both at once. Transformers have an internal resistance - an impedance - due to their manufacture. Indeed, when modeling power supplies (of any kind) in electronics design software, you must model them as a voltage source and a resistance in series. For instance the secondary of a transformer is one single piece of wire connecting both terminals. It's wound in a coil, and that has effects, but its static resistance is the same as if the wire were stretched out straight. And it's thick wire, so resistance is very, very low. Less than 120/10000 or 0.012 ohms. Remember, any wire resistance in the transformer turns into heat inside the transformer. And by and large they convection-cool.
So yes, lightning can path through that "coiled up wire" very easily to leap from hot to neutral to get to ground.
Still could be bad for appliances attached to the hot wire, but the appliance doesn't take the brunt of the hit. The transformer does.
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