We had a storm an hour or so ago. The electricity went off and we unplugged the important stuff but left all the lights on. Every time it would lightning between here and the mainline( about 2 miles) where it hooks on, our lights would come on. It did that 3 times. It doesn't seem unreasonable, its just the first time I've seen it. I told my wife if we could get hooked on like that we could get free electricity. Now I'm going to check out kites and get my wife to hold it. No, wait I just got that look, lol !

I called it in, but there is only 2 of us on this line and I told them not to be in any hurry. It is starting to get hot with no air moving, but I have 2 generators to save the day.

Well, it IS 1.21 jigo-watts

Is lightning AC or DC. It seemed like Direct Current from the Heavens, lol.

Cool! I’ve never seen that, but I’m usually out of the house when the lights go out so I’d never notice. A shot of lightning on or even near a line can really light up the house. Maybe you lucked out and were far enough away that you were in the sweet spot. Maybe your neighbours a mile away got fried equipment.
If you got a transmission line nearby (older the better as the conductor is usually lower) string in a piece of wire deadended on screw knobs or little insulators. See what kinda voltage you pick up through induction. Ground each end and you’ll get loop current, can light an old 60w build on the old 500kv line nearby, but that sucker is dangerously low. The fire guard trail rises up mid span between towers where the conductor is the lowest. Wife never got out of the truck the last time we went shooting there, getting blasts of anything metal…..lol

were the lights coming on florescent ?

florecent bulbs work by exciting the electrons , lighting o strong radio signal can both work to excite the electrons.

The lights are LED 40 watt. When it did it the first time, I told my wife that light came on. She said no that was just lightning thru the window. About 30 sec later the one in the kitchen and the one in the living room lit up. And again in about a minute lit up again. I had the refrigerator unplugged and I have a big freezer in my shop with a surge protector on it and 2 smaller ones without any surge protector but will have tomorrow after I go to town. I've heard they may wait awhile to go bad, hope not.

I would fly a kite and stand in a a kiddy pool…l
Then,,,,,report to the project manager…..

There's some models that function as emergency lighting so they have a battery.

Some LEDs could maintain a residual charge in their capacitors.

LEDs have a lot lower voltage requirements so if there's enough juice in the air from the lightning you could get some induction in the lines to power the bulbs but not anything else.

Never seen that happen myself

On the other hand, was it a huge widespread outage? Sometimes there can be some long pauses on the transmission side if they’re trying to “clear” the fault. There’s 66kv lines here that are protected by a breaker that’ll reclose after about 15-20 seconds 3 times before locking out. Then from Winnipeg System Control, they can tell it to close and retry the cycle again. They usually do this 3 times so a fault on some lines might take 9 shots. A crane operator a few hours north of here got really hammered before they locked it open. Just cuz it’s dead, doesn’t mean it won’t come back live any second…..lol.
After we repair a problem and go talk to a couple customers down the line, it’s always weird how they describe the outage. The little distribution recloser is programmed to open for 4 seconds after seeing a fault, then reenergize for 2 seconds on a shorter “trip curve”. Ours are usually programmed to do this twice. Then on the 3rd try, a longer “curve” is hoping to burn the problem off the line, or pop the fuse on the tap that may be the problem. The customers say the power went off for about a minute then came back for a second, then off for another minute. Seems like when the power goes out, one second feels like 10…..lol
I remember when I was younger church on Sunday. Little thunder storm rolled through during the sermon and there’s a bright flash, loud bang, outage for a few seconds and the everything returned to normal. Preacher says that God wanted him to finish his sermon because the power came back on…….but now, you know the real story…..lol

This exactly is what you may have seen. On distributions lines work the same way but lower voltages and different curves for operating devices. You may have seen back feed from a three phase line that was operating under fault and seen on a single phase line which you maybe feed from.

When my girls were little, they had talking dolls. When it would lighting , they would talk!! Man! Talk about freak out my girls in the middle of the night when they started to talk!!

Semi related..........when I was a kid.....during storms.........word was to take standard AM radio and turn it to lowest frequency........down in 5's category. Lightning would cause static.......we have all heard that.........but if a tornado was nearby, that would turn into a solid roar.......time to run for cover. And same with a TV.......rabbit ears or antenna. Turn TV to channel 2....then darken screen with the brightness button in back........lighting would create white flashes..........tornado close by.......screen would come on bright and glow. Time to run for cover.

Our electricity has been off 3 times in less than a year. Its less than 2 mile to the main transmission line. There is no limbs of any kind along it. I think there is a short on one of the poles when it gets wet. We have never seen the power try to come back on until they come and trip the switch back at the main line. Sometimes then when they turn it on it does come on then throw again until it gets the short burned off, that is the reason I always turn every thing off so it doesn't sit there coming and going. I told them when I called in that my lights were coming on but he never had any comment. When the truck did his initial drive by it was raining too hard for me to talk to him. It just seemed like the lightning was timed just right with the lights coming on that that was the cause, but may have just been coincidental. It may have been that the main transmission line was trying to jump across the breaker, but there wasn't enough power to turn the one fan I hadn't turned off on. I do thank you all for your input !

I built this house in '71 and have an interesting lightning story that happened in the early '90's. I don't feel great right now and am going to try to go to church so will tell maybe later.

Fence under powerlines can be hot all the time

The rural electric guys were out to change a dusk to dawn light a few years back. Among other things......they told me the individual customer meters are rigged such that when the power goes off, they know it. No need to call it in. And assuming you have internet access, you can go to their website and call up an outage map........which has an estimated time power will be back up. Lot more sophisticated than we know.

Our electric company here (First Energy/Met-Ed) sucks. We have outages on average every month. They’re outage map is an absolute joke. It’s full of misinformation and just plain old bull crap. Standard estimate of restoration time is three hours, and they simply just keep adding to that in three hour increments. Most outages here, the once a month ones, last between 8 and 24 hours.

Those smart meters are slick, but we don’t have any here yet. Some were causing fires in Saskatchewan, but I believe most of Ontario has them. The info on our map that our customers have access to is only as good as the info the guy in the field enters. Every call starts off with an estimate restoration time of 3hrs no matter what. It’s kind of a BS set up where changing a pole could go smooth and only take an hour, but we’ll tell dispatch 4hrs so we look like heros. But they’ll even complain when the outage is shorter than predicted….lol.
When there’s transmission, sub transmission and distribution lines near a customer that’s out, it can be pretty comical listening to them tell you where to start looking……
“ it’s coming from that tower there, you can still hear it buzzing….don't touch the tower!”
When the 500kv tower line feeds straight into Minnesota and is hotter that a $2 pistol crackling away, and there’s a dead squirrel at the base of their transformer pole….lol