hueyville wrote:For the guy that thinks his machine getting popped while using it is good consider consider this. The average lightning bolt is about an inch wide and five miles long. However, there have been much longer bolts. The longest bolt ever recorded crossed 118 miles in the Dallas-Ft. Worth area. Lightning can soar to temperatures of approximately 50,000°, five times hotter than the surface of the sun, and can contain as much as 200 million volts.
While I'm not in favor of being hooked up to the CPAP when the power line gets hit by lightning, the danger is still less than what you would think from the above numbers. Once the lighting gets into the power system, it's looking for ground. Most of the energy is going to find the easiest path to ground. In order to get to you, it's go to go though the house wiring, which has inductive and resistive impedence to the current flow. Then it has to get through the power brick, then through the machine, through the hose, through the mask, to get to you. Then once it gets to you, it does no harm unless it finds a path to ground. It has to get through the bed, the bed frame, then through your carpet, wood, or linoleum flooring, through the concrete into the rebar in the slab, then into the ground.
It's going to be much easier for the bulk of the current to find other paths to ground. It will arc to the ground or neutral in the breaker box, the outlets, all the other electrical devices, etc. Even if your ground rod connection is corroded, the lightning will jump through that gap pretty easily if necessary. It can also attempt to arc to ground from the wiring or any devices plugged into the house.
Once lightning gets into the electrical system, it has a whole lot of paths to get to ground. They're probably going to be a whole lot more attractive to the lightning bolt than the path through you. It's not like standing outside holding a golf club over your head and wearing spiked shoes. That way, you're the preferred path and all the current goes through you. For most cases, the path through the CPAP patient is going to be so poor compared to the other choices that there's not that much risk.
Yes, there's some risk. Sometimes lightning does "what it wants to." It may ignore the electrical situation entirely, and come in through the window and strike you directly. The odds are it will find some path other than the CPAP patient.
That's all about the question of electrocuting the patient. Once it hits the electrical system, there's a good chance it will damage your CPAP because the CPAP machine is directly connected to the hot wire and the neutral wire.
I'd still rather not be connected to the CPAP when lightning hits my house.
