Electrical Earthing System Design & Soil Resistivity Testing
What are the procedures for creating an HV Earthing System Design? Also, how might these differ from an LV Earth design?
Firstly, although the principles underpinning HV and LV earthing are similar, the approaches are very different.
The first huge difference is the recognition that HV electrical earthing design is probabilistic in nature. Whereas LV earthing is far less so.
What do I mean?
[Read more…] about Earthing System Design Procedure A Probabilistic ApproachGood news – having just finished a project to pin lovely shiny copper conductors to their supporting structures protecting their Earthing Arrangements. We’ve ended up with quite a few surpluses of the Fischer FNAII stainless pins (we call them Titan pins – part no. 044112) leftover – 3,400 to be exact!
These bad boys are simple to fit concrete structures using a 6mm dia masonry drill at discrete spacings (typically 500mm) to make things incredibly hard for a thief to remove the valuable conductor without spending considerable time trying. This Anti-theft earthing arrangement is not a silver bullet, but even if they do persist all that they can practically do is to cut away a 500mm section at a time not 10’s or 100’s of meters. Therefore slowing the whole process down massively.
Thus, making things incredibly frustrating for the thief and making them more vulnerable to getting caught as well as reducing how much of the conductor goes missing.
[Read more…] about Are you getting tired of people stealing your lovely earthing arrangementsI thought I’d continue from my last blog piece talking about heavy current injection earth testing. By talking about a key application where it can potentially deliver much better results than the modern CDEGS approach. Therefore, on your earthing arrangements.
Many industrial sites built in the 1950s and 60s as industrialisation grew. This, in line with the expansion of the electrical grid. Led to a huge program of electrical substation construction around the world. What this means is that some of us own the responsibility of managing sites with ageing transformers, assets and equipment. Thus the design to obsolete standards? Therefore to know what hazard this presents today, is simply unknown.
[Read more…] about How do I know my 1950’s earthing arrangements are still keeping my workforce safe?