Update on House Wiring Help Needed

Thanks for all the replies.

New ground rods going in this weekend (weather permitting). Brother will be driving, I will be wiring.

Will try turning off all breakers, except the one feeding the wall outlets, to see what happens, this weekend.

Furnace (new 2 years ago) sheet metal & ductwork to ground checked, no voltage, either to ground or incoming water pipe. (Will check again after new ground rods put in).

Overhead lights to be rewired, separate circuit, with grounds. They are CFL's.(will be replaced with incandescent).

Ceiling tiles are T & G fiber, nailed in place, (no suspended grid), but will be torn down, as brother hates the look. Will be replaced with same style after rewiring.

Have not personally checked bare speaker buzz, but suspect it is as Michael Terrill proposed, the speaker cone is focusing ambient 60 Hz, and when you stick your ear near it, you hear it.

Question concerning water pipe ground. Breaker box is in NW corner of basement. Incoming water pipe is in NE corner, near last wall outlet in the line. Have not checked if any other grounds to plumbing exist. Should this be grounded to the breaker box, with it's own ground wire?

More updates after this weekend.

Reply to
Steve Walker
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If you have a rental place nearby, check the cost of renting a ground rod driver. The ones I've seen electricians using were electric (rather than gas or pneumatic) and took 5 to 10 minutes to sink an

8-foot ground rod (10 minutes when the rod hit a rock and had to be repositioned). Without a driver, it's easy to bend the rod or only be able to sink it half way. [...]
Reply to
James Waldby

He's going to try this way:

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Reply to
Steve Walker

Yes. Not sure of the wire guage, but there is a bare stranded wire made specifically for the job.

Reply to
clare

Once, in some Ham magazine, they used copper pipe for a ground rod; they attached a garden hose fitting, and the water pressure loosened the dirt, so they could about drive it in with their bare hands.

Cheers! Rich

Reply to
Rich Grise

Big rocks and small boulders are what causes problems driving ground rods.

John

Reply to
John

They also stop you when digging holes for deck posts!!!

Back when I built the deck on this place I sunk 9 posts in the ground. Dug about 4-5 feet on most of them and planted them good. Had only one that gave a problem. Dug down about 3 feet and hit a rock. No problem, I'll just dig around it and move it and fill in the hole. Well after digging a hole almost 6 feet across both ways and not finding any edge to the rock I decided that it was going to be there a while. Placed the post, poured concrete around it and buried it. Hasn't moved more than an inch in almost 20 years! Guess it will probably stay that way a while longer.

Had a neighbor who needed a drilled well for the bank to approve the mortgage (this with three dug wells that had good water). They brought in a guy who set up and told them, "No problem I'll be done in about 3 days" His rig hit solid rock about 25 feet down. He moved and found rock at about 45 feet. He finally gave up with one and they cheated a bit. The "drilled well" got connected up underground with one of the dug wells. The amount of water made the bank happy and AFAIK it has never been hooked to...

Reply to
Steve W.

I had a dodgy power problem that I just solved yesterday. About three weeks ago the electric company had to come out and reattach the service drop because a tree limb nailed it while being trimmed.

Any way the guy that came out had expressed a concern that the wires between the weather head and the meter might not be in the best of shape.

First thing weird that happened was that my microwave stopped working, and I figured that it was just old and something failed.

Over the next few weeks I had 3 CFLs fail and I finally got suspicious that something was amiss when my back-up microwave stopped heating and when I pushed down the toaster and I saw one light dim and a different bulb glow brighter.

When I got out my meter I found some circuits at 140+ volts and some down around 80 volts.

I checked everything I could think of and finally my suspicions came to rest on the two hots being shorted before the meter but after the weather head. I called the power company and made an appointment for the next day and went out and purchased 100 feet of wire to replace the old wires.

When the guy got there he found that the first guy had not properly spliced the neutral, and effectively I had no neutral.

A quick splice and all was again good. Good except for the $100 down the drain for wire.

Anyway To address your question about the water pipes, you should bond all of the metal pipes back to the ground bus in your panel and to each other. There should also be a jumper going around your water meter and around the water heater. You should also bond the gas pipes also.

Roger Shoaf

Reply to
RS at work

This is the classic indication of a failed neutral. it can fry EVERYTHING in your house, from light bulbs to computers and TV sets, and furnaces and AC units, too.

You want to get this fixed as quick as you can when the symptom shows up.

Jon

Reply to
Jon Elson

Exactly what I was about to say. A couple of other points: This situation can also raise the voltage on neutral, usually just a good tingle, but potentially more. Also, this can only happen if the ground rods are ineffective. So, to "RS at work": check your ground rod wiring.

Bob

Reply to
Bob Engelhardt
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Hydraulic drilling. I used to do that as a kid -- shoving perhaps twenty feet of garden hose into the rather hard ground in South Texas. Worked fine as long as the water keeps flowing.

But -- it may take a while for the surrounding dirt to settle into good contact with the pipe -- after the water washed a lot of it away.

I've also seen hydraulic drilling used to route fiber optics data lines under roads. The company which did it was called "Flo-Mole" IIRC.

Enjoy, DoN.

Reply to
DoN. Nichols

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