There was a fire at a house in my town, a total loss, because of lightning. The owner of that house was lobbying for our town to add lightning rods to the building code. I asked my builder about it and he said it would be about $10K. We decided not to do it.

We are building in FL, so lots of lightning. We asked about it and got similar answers to yours and both sides seemed to have strong reasons for their view. We didn't do anything yet!

HomeAdvisor says: Installing lightning protection systems in the home costs between $437 and $2,537, averaging most homeowners $1,486. The cost ranges from $100 for just a surge protector to over $3,000 for rods and grounding system.

Shop around, if a builder doesn't want an extra headache, they often over-price the job. A house sitting exposed up on a cliff ledge is just asking to be hit; I would:

- Add lightning protection to the structure.

- Keep replacement cost insurance on the house contents; the lightning protection may save the house but a close strike will most likely take out all the electronics within.

Thank you @HU-864564120 If you have whole-house surge protection at the breaker box, does that save all the home electronics in the case of a hit? I believe tha's only good for 1 hit, before having to be replaced.

The energy in a lightning strike is massive and realistically little can be done to protect from a direct hit. Your best defense is a layered, multi-level approach, and then keep the insurance policy up to date. And, no, surge protectors are not a guarantee of downstream protection, they only try to limit how high the surge goes. Downstream devices will always experience some level of surge.

Whether it takes one or more hits to take out a surge protector, there is no one answer, it all depends. The main or most common protection component in a surge protectors are MOV's, Metal Oxide Varistors, and their failure mode is additive: small surges can add up over time to fail them or a large surge can take them out with one hit. As such, a working surge protector could be close to failure when the next big hit comes; at that moment they would offer little protection.

Also, a direct strike by lightning is not a requirement to fail nearby electronics, there is also the transformer effect where a large flow of current (the lightning strike) induces a voltage in any metal nearby. There is no direct electrical connection, the energy transfer is via the magnetic field surrounding the current flow. Remember those 300-ohm twin-lead FM antennas we used to have up on the wall? I was looking out my window in college (~1975) when 1/4 mile down the street in front of me a lighting bolt hit; at the same moment I heard a loud snap from within my FM stereo and the FM decoder chip was gone. Electronics encased in a grounded metal box would have the best protection from such an event, but how many electronics today are housed in plastic enclosures?

I have just experienced the second direct lightning strike on my house in two years. I have an earthing rod outside, which takes the lightning hit. Although I always unplug everything (as I'm fully off-grid for power and only have a small array of PV panels, so need to minimise my power usage, especially in winter), my phone line and modem have been fried each time. Last time my landline phone also went, this time a computer died, because it was hooked up to the modem, although not to the power.

I am wondering now about increasing my lightning protection. I have a surge protection powerboard that I plug all my electronics into, but I'm thinking more about adding lightning rod(s) to the roof. Is this a job for a builder? Or someone else who specialises in lightning protection? When I google it, I only seem to find big businesses whose market is big buildings, mines, and other such massive clients, whereas my house is only 7m square!

I have talked to a company that does it at the framing stage of new construction. I do not know about after the construction. This company does a lot at the lake and the cost is about $4k for the size house we are building (4000 sf).

Thanks, Lil. I'll keep googling...