Could any fellow members advise on the requirement or any such regulation regarding the need to have or retro fit a lightning spike or device to a building.

We have just had a compliance audit conducted with a non compliance for not having a lightning rod/spike, however can't give us any advise other than to contact a designer ?

Our buildings are made up of part metal frame and clad, other sections are older brick and profiled roof.

What we do not want to do is certainly attrack lightning to the building, and have never had any such strikes on the ground or buildings.

Regards

Mark

Hi Steve, I guessed as much but a our building is mismatched and dates back to the sixties.

Thank you

You had a “compliance audit”. Nice, against what standard? An audit has to be against a published standard which you can work towards because you know what you are trying to achieve and can have an idea of how to do it. I keep hearing about audits which seem to  be made up as the auditor goes along. That is not an audit; it’s a money making racket.

Edited by user 18 May 2021 12:19:09(UTC)  | Reason: missing w rds

As with all spurious comments get them to provide hard documentary evidence to support their assertion otherwise they should withdraw it.

In 1965, the British Standard BS CP326 was introduced and BS6651 was published in 1985, In 2006, BS6651 was superseded by the BS EN 62305. 

The BS EN 62305 updated the standards, and included the protection of electrical systems and equipment such as computers, fire alarms and PA systems. It also defined lightning protection zones...

In short that is the answer the auditor should have given you...there are solutions..:)

On top of my agreement with the posts above with regard to the legitimacy of the audit.

Have a think about the following perhaps?

Your insurer will likely have some input, especially now this has been mentioned.

You should think about Surge Protection (SP) for the electrical installation regardless of the requirement for a Lightning Protection system (LPS).

The requirement for SP is now mandated under the current version of BS 7671, which I realise is not mandatory, nor retrospective.

However, it is playing catch-up.

There are a LOT of non-linear loads in domestic, commercial and industrial premises these days, and many devices are built to a price not a standard, thus being susceptible to mains borne surge from within, and external to the installation, such as switching spikes on the supply network.

The first thing you should really do to address this is look at the Ceraunic map to see what the expected flash density is in your locality.

From this you can see what the chances of a strike are.

It will then be your organisations decision whether to pursue the investigations into an LPS.

The first thing would be a risk assessment in accordance with the relevant standards, which involves a rolling sphere model of the premises and some modelling to be sure that if you need an LPS, it is done correctly.

It appears that you are thinking, if done incorrectly it can be worse than not having an LPS, which is correct.

Mark, we once got a non conformance report ('NCR') that indicated that we did not have a system for the reporting and investigation of "near misses".

I challenged the auditor to provide an authoritative definition of "near miss" since he could see our system for incident reporting and investigation and how it was implemented.

Since he couldn't come up with that authoritative definition I advised that we would be rejecting the NCR as being invalid.

During the discussion the auditor did cite some examples of "near miss" but I explained why some would consider them NOT to be "near misses". 

Since I like to keep things simple, I used the example shown in HSE guidance of a brick falling onto a scaffold platform and then bouncing to the ground. 

At first sight that seems clearly to be a "near miss". But what if the scaffold comes complete with a fan deliberately designed to catch such an object. His view was that as this was the case and the fan had done what it was intended to do it wasn't a "near miss". My retort was that scaffold boards get moved for all sorts of reasons, so I could not predict (WITHOUT the benefit of hindsight) whether the fan would be complete when the brick fell, so that one board might be out of position and the brick might reach the ground. Ergo, in my book it could be decided that the simple act of the brick falling was a "near miss" - but of course, if he had argued the opposite in his first response to my Q, I would have explained why I still disagreed. 

There is no way of coming to an authoritative definition on which people would agree and as soon as you introduce unnecessary ambiguity into ANY system people will find ways of getting round it.

Auditors need to get more used to the auditee challenging them!