It's storming outside and you've seen some lightning strikes that have been a little bit too close for comfort. Than it happens... your wind generator gets struck by lightning. You're ok though because you took steps to protect yourself from lightning strikes on your wind generator.

There are a couple ways to protect yourself and your equipment if lightning strikes your wind generator. In a situation like this you need to build in failsafes. What that means is that you might end up with a damaged motor in your wind generator, but that's pretty cheap to replace. Having to replace your inverter or battery bank isn't quite so cheap so we do our best to protect them.

If you're like me your wind generator is standing on some sort of steel tower. It's great because it provides a good structure, but it's basically a huge lightning rod. The first step we're going to take is to ground our tower. That way if lightning strikes the tower it won't get to the house. Always remember that electricity tries to find the easiest way to ground.

The easiest way to do this is get some heavy gauge wire and a steel rod. Stick the steel rod into the ground and attach the wire to the tower and the steel rod. If the lightning happens to strike your tower the chances of it travelling through the wire to the house is greatly reduced because it's easier for the electricity to travel through the wire into the ground.

That being said you should just rely on grounding your tower. If that's not enough and some of the strike starts travelling down the wires to your batteries or inverter you're going to blow them up. It's always important to add a couple more components into your system. They're not really expensive, but it can save you a ton of money.

What we're going to do is install a fuse and a lightning arrestor hooked up to wherever the power from your wind generator goes (I'll be talking about a charge controller, but it could be an inverter etc.). We're going to hook up a fuse that's rated for 5 amps higher than the maximum current that you can produce. If you find you're blowing fuses up just increase the amperage of the fuse.

If a lightning strike happens and the grounded tower isn't enough the fuse is going to blow up which is going to break the circuit. In addition, we're also going to be using something called a lightning arrestor.

The lightning arrestor works pretty much like a fuse as well. If too much power is flowing through it the circuit is going to open and prevent electricity from flowing through. This all happens in a very small fraction of time so there's not time for it to damage any of your equipment.

I get the lightning arrestors off of ebay. You can find them here:

Lightning Arrestors on Ebay

If you have any questions about protecting your system from lightning strikes just leave a comment.