Coax Grounding question -- Help!

[socaldave]

Grounding discourages lightning strikes. That is it's only purpose.

That little wire does not protect you if you get hit.

If you don't ground you may have helped lightning strike, putting the lives of the residents at risk.

 

[royd]

harlanba:
Maybe someday (soon) I'll order another 500' spool of burial-grade cable, rent a trencher, and re-run both of those cables AROUND the house to the primary ground point. Unfortunately, moving the dish is just not an option (due to line of sight).

There's thunder rumbling in the distance (as I type). I just got my 2 new DP311s activated last night, so the true test may be coming soon!!!

Thanks for ALL of the input on this issue!
Kevin T.

Snipped from
Second post

Per NEC guidelines any additional ground rods must be atached to the structures primary ground source by way of a #6 gauge wire.

Just run a #6 gauge ground wire AROUND the house
It should be underground, but does not need to be deep
Google ground loop

 

[Van]

ok since the topic is now on apartment grounding how would you do it if your in a apartment as many here in california your only option may be grounding to the A/C condenser which can be on a central electrical feed and on a seperate circuit per unit and not connected to your panel do u ground to it knowing al the A/C's have a electrical panel dedicated to them?

Only way I would ground to an a/c unit is to ground to its chasis and thats only on commercial grade units, most apartment units are the same as residential and are either ground mounts or wall/window mounts. The reason that many of the E facilities and subs / rsp's are turning a blind eye and approving ungroundable installs is because of performance requirements from E itsself that do not take into account factors such as no grounding, no line of sites, customer no shows, customer cancelations, cancelations of any type. So if a facility that normaly does say 8k work orders come through in a month and out of that %10 are no line of sites, %7 customer cancels and %5 customer no shows means that this counts against the facility regardless of wether it was within their control or not.

E places considerable pressure on its mid and lower management as well as its hourly employee's to complete more and more jobs so this means less focus on quality of work and customer education and this puts the hourly employee's at the greatest risk of loosing their jobs not to mention any legal ramifications for installing an ungrounded system that gets hit.

 

[cablewithaview]

bottom line, lightening will get what it wants, ground block or no ground block.

 

[SimpleSimon]

And, no, it's NOT connected to the main ground rod (80' away at the other end of house) per NEC recommendations, but this is the best I can do (for now). Maybe someday (soon) I'll order another 500' spool of burial-grade cable, rent a trencher, and re-run both of those cables AROUND the house to the primary ground point.

Don't worry abut it - as several others have posted, reality is you're grounding to drain static, and what you've got WILL do that. The NEC guys control the grounding "code", but do NOT understand reality. This is low-voltage, NOT AC power. Different stuff, but legally, yeah, gotta do it. Reality is that it will make NO difference.

As for a cable surge protector, YES, YES, YES - DO IT. And yes, it must be rated for satellite, both for DC voltage passing and for frequency response.

 

[Van]

Panamax surge protectors are ones that I recommend.