In my OPINION, this is why you want to have NOTHING connected to ground at all, whatsoever. However, this may be only possible for someone who has an entirely off-grid system.
Ground your system and buy a safe-t-cut RCBO(1500thb)for your home these have a built in SPD that protects your home and electronics from surges and the RCBO+grounding prevents poorly trained Thai electricians from killing you and your family.
Thank you for that information--I'm looking for a good GFCI device for an entire building....however, that is a separate issue from that of grounding for lightning. A good GFCI breaker does not actually need to be grounded to function, if I'm not mistaken. It cuts power based on an inequality of current flow between the hot and neutral lines, which should only occur if something is grounding unexpectedly, causing a portion of the outgoing current to fail to return. (Perhaps a certified electrician can explain it better and/or correct me if this is incorrect.)
From my experience it's very rare for this to be true here in Thailand, even the government run electricity supplier occasionally swaps live and neutral on the transformer for our local community just to keep me on my toes.
That is a pretty bad ass picture!
100% agree. Just like antenna cables at a tower site. Everything is bonded together.
Sure if your setup is compact, offgrid and disconnected from utility. But if you got ground mounted panels some distance away from house then ground potential exposure is inevitable.
That's because your ground rod became main ground for everyone fed by your utility transformer. If you did not have beefy SPD connected to your utility feed and that ground rod then surge induced on AC distribution wire would travel through your UPS and PC equipment into your new ground rod. Not a problem with having ground, just user error.
That’s a REAL bad ass picture….
What was my error?
From your other thread:
I read it again and noticed you had your offgrid setup connected to this ground rod. I thought it was utility fed outlet. Was your computer connected to Ethernet or cable/dsl modem or in any way to a long wire coming from outside? That would create continuity to ground for lightning pulse.
I guess one of the positives of Starlink (assuming the dish on a long metal pole doesn't act as a big lightning magnet)
Make the pole your ground rod!
Or if you were using one of these "cheap" MOV based surge protector power strips they divert the surge to the ground line which means it can damage your equipment that way as well. More expensive surge protectors divert to neutral.
No, there was no external connection. The computer was connected to the internet via its own internal wifi to my router. Actually, it was a Mac Pro and was in a multi-day process of rendering a video for me (so much to that--lost it). In fact, in Laos, I did not even have DSL coming to the house--I was bridging to another building half a kilometer away via a set of Ubiquiti nanostations that connected to my router--which was probably running off the same inverter at the time as was the Mac, but without being explicitly grounded as the Mac was.
Cheers bob I'll be looking to do a proper grounding system when I build my power shed this is a good explanation (current one works to a degree but I'm sure it's not ideal as it was mainly fitted by a Thai "electrician") hopefully I can get yours and Tim's input when it comes time.
Yes ground it but don't use the Ethernet coming off the antenna as the lightning path going into the house then the modem where it plugs in the wall outlet. That will get cooked. You need to ground the ethernet via surge suppressor at the pole that is tied back to utility ground. Pole, ethernet surge arrestor, and utility ground (main house ground) are all at the same potential.
very common for it to come in or go to the Utility. It's got to so somewhere. Make everything tied together and add some surge suppression. If you are lucky only the surge suppression gets damaged. Sacrificial lamb doing it's job.
To be clear, my only "connection" to the utility (if I hadn't unplugged it during the storm--it's been too long ago, and I don't remember now), was the IOTA charger that charged my two large lead-acid batteries. After that, it was an inverter from those batteries that fed my computer. The computer was powered from the inverter, from the batteries, and nothing in the system was grounded except for that plug to the computer to which I had specially added grounding. The devices, like my refrigerator, which were plugged to the grid, were not connected in any way to the inverter circuit--nor were any of the grid-powered devices in the house damaged in the lightning strike. I don't remember seeing the strike, but I sure heard it--it was loud, and sounded like it must have been within about 200 meters' distance from the house. I was very afraid when the computer had gone down that it would have been damaged; but fortunately, the UPS took the hit and spared the computer. (I had a pure sine wave inverter to which the UPS was plugged into that grounded plug, then the computer and its monitor were plugged into the UPS.)
UPS acted like your surge arrestor. Took one for the team
