Bill Q - Nothing will survive a direct lightening strike, not even the ground rod. If a ground rod were ever struck by lightening the circuit breakers would cease to work. Without circuit breakers nothing would prevent wires from overheating and starting fires. Protective devices like UPS, power conditioners, voltage regulators, surge suppressors, etc., are totally ineffective when connected to defective grounding.

As the previous post mentioned, a second ground rod is required to be bonded to the existing ground system - - -provided the existing ground properly works ! Testing for faulty ground requires a $400.00 circuit analyzer to rule out bootleg grounds. A clamp on ground rod tester can determine if your ground rod even meets the NEC requirement of 25 ohms or less-the cost for one of those babies is around $1,500.00. I highly doubt a dish installer carries either of those and more improbable that he would know which end to hold it. and if he did he is even less likely to hold a license enabling him to correct the problem should he find one.

Ground rods are the backbone of what counts for effective protection against lightening strikes. Microprocessor based equipment manufacturers such as Ericsson, Lucent, Motorola and Nortel are known to void their equipment warranties at sites where the ground rod performance does not meet their explicit earth grounding requirements, typically 5 ohms or less. Residential & Commercial buildings need only follow the NEC code requiring ground rod resistance to be 25 Ohms or less. and not to the manufacturers low resistance standards. Even if the dish tech installed an additional ground rod and bonded it to the buildings properly working grounding system, it would likely take up to three 30 foot long ground rods pounded down into the water table to meet microprocessor based low resistance standards of less than 5 ohms resistance. Furthermore, resistance of ground rods is rarely tested by the electrical inspector, next to nobody meets NEC ground rod requirements (25 ohms or less), so power quality should never be assumed. It certainly wouldnt surprise me at all to discover that far more than 80% of the electrical inspectors (25 ohms or less) ground quality 'sign-off' were assumed.

Now, the NEC does not call for what is known as “low resistance electrical grounding”. These specifications are most often those of equipment manufacturers, power quality consultants or electrical engineers familiar with sensitive equipment’s grounding requirements.The NEC does not address the low resistance grounding or bonding requirements of the manufacturers' grounding standards for thier sensitive networked systems nor does it even address the testing of NEC compliant grounding beyond initial inspection. But that doesnt mean there wouldnt be hell to pay upon the discovery of some magnificent percentage revealing massive deficiencies in ground rod code requirements.

The point is, Dish intallers are expected to go back and properly ground their systems against a backdrop of an even greater percentage of failings to meet NEC ground rod code.requirements let alone low resistance standards.

Exactly how does anyone propose for dish installers or anyone installing microprocessor based equipment to actually meet the real requirements for grounding? Go back and run a #6 to a cold water pipe? No doubt that'll make somebody happy but Id be included in that happiness too if EVERYBODY met code.- starting with a code enforcement department in charge of ensuring compliant ground rods !! I'd have a better chance of winning the lottery than finding a compliant ground rod at your-name-here's home, Anytown, USA

Jeff Meuse

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