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Testing the Earth System
Here is a simple test you can do to make sure that you have enough ground rods on your system.
- Turn off the energizer.
- Go at least 300 feet away from the energizer and heavily short out your system by laying several steel rods, pipe, log chain, etc on the fence. If it is dry out you may need to drive the pipe into the ground. You are wanting to load up your system so that you are getting 1200 KV or less on your voltmeter. This is hard to do with some of the big energizers, in which case you may need to run a jumper creating a major short.
- Turn the energizer back on. and check your fence voltage, making sure your have it down to 1200KV or less (that reads 1.2 on a digital voltmeter) If it is still above that, then add more load.
- Using a digital voltmeter (the ones with a ground probe work best here) take a reading off the last or farthest ground rod in your system. It should read no more than 300 volts or 0.3 on your meter. A "0" reading is great, but if it reads more than 0.3 it is telling you to (1) add more ground rods or (2) find a more suitable location for your earth system.
Earthing checklist:
- all joints and connections - joined correctly.
- ground rod clamps are secure.
- rods are at least 10 feet apart
- all materials in you system are of the same material.
- earth rods buried deeply in the soil.
- rods are at least 6 feet long.
- there is a sufficient number of rods.
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