[RFI] RF noise and ground

[Jim Brown]

Hi Ken,

This all sounds quite familiar. The home I bought here in NorCal is a 
relatively small single-story, with two bedrooms, a living/dining room, 
kitchen, and two baths. The second bedroom and bath are "marketing" 
bedrooms, and serve primarily to increase the market value. There's a 
detached garage with a "mother-in-law" sort of apartment. Power enters 
the house, feeds the second building through two transfer switches for 
the backup generator.

After taking ownership, when I started checking things out, I found that 
  the only earth electrode was in the second building; AND a #10 bare 
copper ran from the panelboard for that building, up through an attic, 
across the building (about 12 ft wide), and snaked down the outside 
wall, following framed out windows to the rod.

In the house, "ground" was another #10 to an outlet for a garden hose, 
fed by PVC pipe. Another I discovered were 120V outlets fed between a 
phase and the green wire. I found other mis-wired outlets in the house.

One other tidbit -- there was a generator in a nice little house by the 
service and transfer switches, but it could not possibly have run -- it 
was missing major parts.

Oh, and by the way -- for the mortgage, I had to pay good money to a 
company who sent an inspector to verify that everything was up to Code. 
He didn't find any of this, commenting only on the height of steps and 
railings that ran between the two buildings, their elevations differing 
by 6-8 ft.

We were living in Chicago when we made the purchase, and only saw the 
place for a few hours one day on a visit to the area looking for our new 
home.

73, Jim K9YC


  On 1/26/2025 6:47 PM, Ken Gordon wrote:
> When I investigated the "ground" system, I discovered a piece of #8 solid copper wire,
> leading from the buss bar of the old panel, exacly 33 feet long, terminating at a very carefully
> installed clamp to the cold-water feed from the city system....which was plastic pipe.
> 
> I replaced that with a much shorter bit of #8 solid copper wire, terminating at two 8' long
> copper-plated steel ground rods about 5 feet from the new panel. I would love to have been
> able to install those ground-rods closer to the panel, but was unable to do so due to the
> surrounding concrete. I DID make it as short as I could.
> 
> RFI disappeared.