Hello everyone
my name is Tarek, i work as a concert and show lighting operator with over 20 years of experience in this field, so i have gained a decent amount of electrical experience over the years but i'm NOT a professional electrician
i will try to explain my problem in details so this is gonna bel a long post ,so please bear with me
first of all, i live in Lebanon , middle east ,where we have a disastrous electrical system where only 4 hours of 220V electricity per day are provided by the government and most of the remaining time we rely on very expensive private generators ...
I'm building my own solar electric system in addition to a wind turbine (still unfinished and not running yet) to power my apartment my system will be about 5KW.
In my country we don't have grounding systems and we don't have rules and regulations for the power departments , in this country you can do whatever you want as long as you don't damage the main grid, all of electrical wires either the grid or generators come only in 4 lines (3 phase and a neutral) we don't have earth wires also all plugs inside houses are only neutral and live wire , no ground lines are integrated anywhere.
In order to protect myself from surges , static electricity and lighting (which occurs plenty of times in a year in my area) i am looking to build a grounding system.
I live in a 4 story building where the top apartment and roof are mine , the area where i live in is all concrete in fact the area is all built on a giant rock so i have no access to any place where i can burry grounding rods,
In my building we have a basement which has a Well which was dug into the rocky ground before municipal water reached our area (we are a new county) ...the well is about 60 meters deep , so when the municipal water reached our area they removed the pump and the pipes from the well and abandoned it , all that was left was the metal jacket of the well and i truly don't how deep the jacket goes, i have tried to use light and i could see it was going about 20 meters where i lost the view ....
so depending on all the conditions i have decided to try using the will jacket as a ground (electrode) so what i did was the following :
i have run a 25mm² single core cable from my roof where all my system is going to be installed all the way down to the metal jacket of the well (about 35 meters long cable)...
i have asked an electrical engineer which i came across last month on how to test if the ground is proper and his reply was to test using a multimeter probes connected to ground and neutral and the voltage should not exceed 5V so i did .
i connected my multimeter probes one to the ground cable and one to the neutral , my reading was 18 volts
i tried ground and live wire it was 210 V
live wire and neutral is 218V.
My questions are :
1- is this a good reading ?
2 -is my ground working properly
3- am i measuring correctly or should i measure in another way if yes can you explain how
4- if this is not a good ground how can i build a grounding system in this area where its all a big rock and i have no access to soil
5- is there any other way i can protect my solar panels / inverters / batteries / wind turbine / from static electricity and lightning
looking forward for your help and thanks in advance
my name is Tarek, i work as a concert and show lighting operator with over 20 years of experience in this field, so i have gained a decent amount of electrical experience over the years but i'm NOT a professional electrician
i will try to explain my problem in details so this is gonna bel a long post ,so please bear with me
first of all, i live in Lebanon , middle east ,where we have a disastrous electrical system where only 4 hours of 220V electricity per day are provided by the government and most of the remaining time we rely on very expensive private generators ...
I'm building my own solar electric system in addition to a wind turbine (still unfinished and not running yet) to power my apartment my system will be about 5KW.
In my country we don't have grounding systems and we don't have rules and regulations for the power departments , in this country you can do whatever you want as long as you don't damage the main grid, all of electrical wires either the grid or generators come only in 4 lines (3 phase and a neutral) we don't have earth wires also all plugs inside houses are only neutral and live wire , no ground lines are integrated anywhere.
In order to protect myself from surges , static electricity and lighting (which occurs plenty of times in a year in my area) i am looking to build a grounding system.
I live in a 4 story building where the top apartment and roof are mine , the area where i live in is all concrete in fact the area is all built on a giant rock so i have no access to any place where i can burry grounding rods,
In my building we have a basement which has a Well which was dug into the rocky ground before municipal water reached our area (we are a new county) ...the well is about 60 meters deep , so when the municipal water reached our area they removed the pump and the pipes from the well and abandoned it , all that was left was the metal jacket of the well and i truly don't how deep the jacket goes, i have tried to use light and i could see it was going about 20 meters where i lost the view ....
so depending on all the conditions i have decided to try using the will jacket as a ground (electrode) so what i did was the following :
i have run a 25mm² single core cable from my roof where all my system is going to be installed all the way down to the metal jacket of the well (about 35 meters long cable)...
i have asked an electrical engineer which i came across last month on how to test if the ground is proper and his reply was to test using a multimeter probes connected to ground and neutral and the voltage should not exceed 5V so i did .
i connected my multimeter probes one to the ground cable and one to the neutral , my reading was 18 volts
i tried ground and live wire it was 210 V
live wire and neutral is 218V.
My questions are :
1- is this a good reading ?
2 -is my ground working properly
3- am i measuring correctly or should i measure in another way if yes can you explain how
4- if this is not a good ground how can i build a grounding system in this area where its all a big rock and i have no access to soil
5- is there any other way i can protect my solar panels / inverters / batteries / wind turbine / from static electricity and lightning
looking forward for your help and thanks in advance
