DO NOT use water pipes for any type of ground, EVER.
Your neighbor can get a direct hit and it will conduct over to your house and fry your gear.
I agree that you should not use water pipes as a guaranteed means of earthing, but for very different reasons.
If your house has copper water pipes, odds are they are already hooked into the ground system, weather you know it or not. The thing is, parts of that system may have been replaced with non-copper piping, so with them you would need to make sure such a connection to earth actually exists. Even if such a connection does exist, it is possible that the connection outside of your house only goes so far before the water company converted to a different non-conducting material, there simply may not be enough copper pipe outside of your house to act as a proper earth ground.
About your stuff getting zapped when your neighbors house gets hit... Your neutral electrical wire is connected to an earth ground in the electric meter on the side of your house. Your neighbors is the same. In the US, this is required under electrical safety codes. This direct electrical connection between your ground system and your neighbors ground system already exists, a second connection will make little to no difference.
That being said, contrary to popular belief, the connection between electrical ground systems will not be the cause of damage in your house. However, any elevated wire coming into your house, such as a phone wire or an electrical wire, will have current induced on it, and that current will be the source of the damage you are concerned about. The lightening acts like a strong radio transmitter, and the wires act like a receiving antenna, we are talking about the same thing that allows us to use radios to communicate, only how much power is in a lightening strike? Contrary to what many people think, it doesn't matter how much potential is on the ground system, as long as that system is used as the reference potential for everything else the energy there will not be the cause of damage.
Lightening protection is not based on keeping lightening out, it is based on keeping all grounds at the same potential. As long as all grounds are at the same potential, there is very little danger in fried electronics from a lightening hit, or any other surge that the ground system has to deal with. In fact, there is more danger in not keeping all grounds, and thus ground references, at the same potential than there is of letting lightening energize the ground system of your house. Our electric safety codes are written as they are with good reason, not following them is asking for trouble.
The DB
