They are actually designed to remove charge from the clouds above where the rod is installed.
Static electrons loves to congregate in small places, I.e. the tip of a needle or the edge or fold in a piece of metal (can help the paint job add extra paint to those places it is needed most, bonus!)
Anyway a lightning rod is probably the best protection but yeah the copper would vapourise if it.was actually hit, causing a fire.
How many gigawatts is that? I’ve a car I need to jump start.
Afaik the proper way is having a proper lightning rod together with the aforementioned cascade of surge suppressors. And of course a PE!
Consumer grade suppressors are meant for indirect strikes, overhead lines near you, or a direct hit on your neighbour's house.
Edit: spelling
Lightning (as far as I know) does not have consciousness and is not out to get your computer!
The parent post was talking about putting a automatic switch in between the power supply to the house (ground active neutral) and switching it off when lightning struck, the problem there is that the switch will not do much if the lightning air gaps around it.
Ground is also a relative term for a lightning strike.
When lightning hits the ground, a potential field emanates from that point. The further out the closer to 0V the potential difference is.
As such it depends on where the strike is in comparison to the house, your wiring, where your house is grounded etc.
For example, if the grounding point on your house is very close to the strike, your house ground will be raised to the voltage of that point away from the stike.
The path to 0V may be through your active wiring, your powesupply, the house frame or the water pipes.
So yeah, hope that helps
That is unless are okay buying oil immersed equipment the size of a fridge. And that’s probably not enough, either.
Now here's one for the engineers. We can tell the future. Musicians change tempo before singing the next verse. ADS-B data tells us when there's a plane coming. Could a "smart" surge protector include a measure of ground noise, to sense local charge differentials, and guess that the next spike is probably lightning rather than a typical mains arc? More sensors yes, but increasing protection only when expected would possibly improve the feedback loop.
A high end consumer grade surge suppressor might be rated for 1000 joules, and a few thousand amps of peak current.
If lightning directly strikes your house wiring, no amount of surge suppressors are going to save you.
For an idea of what a surge suppressor that can handle the blow of a full on lightning strike looks like, take a look at the units used by utility companies on their high tension lines. Typically they are about a 6" in diameter and often several feet long -- and those units still need to be replaced after a single direct hit! https://www.equipmentimes.com/product/details/Lightning-Arre...
The best thing that you can do to protect yourself in the future is to have a lightning rod network installed on your roof, which will shunt the current from the strike directly to the ground. Otherwise the only failsafe alternative is to completely unplug sensitive equipment (still OK to run from battery but with all ethernet etc cables unplugged -- wireless network only) whenever there is a storm predicted.