Ouch, my Ground!
Well, I just got a lesson in proper electrical grounding last night. Tonya woke up in the middle of the night to hear a “clicking” sound coming from the GFI outlet in our upstairs bathroom. As it turns out, I just happened to be transmitting on 40 meters (around 7.200 kHz). The clicking and popping sounds culminated in the GFI actually tripping, though the clicking didn’t cease.
When we remodeled our upstairs, I took stock in that bathroom’s wiring. I almost updated it, but we weren’t working on the bathroom, so I left it alone. The previous owners of the house had remodeled that bathroom a number of years ago and, at the time, there was no grounding system for the house. Code requires a GFI in the bathroom, and a GFI requires, well, a ground! Since there was no ground, the electrician connected the GFI’s ground connection to the water pipes.
Which, coincidentally, I also did for my radio… in the basement. Now, there’s a quite a distance from my water meter (where my radio’s ground is connected) to the ground pole. I do have a solid copper line running from the water pipe ground to the ground rod (as per code), but I think it’s too long to be running the radio on. Basically, my ground wire has become part of the antenna. That’s not good.
So I think I’ll be getting a ground rod tonight and driving it into the ground closer to the side of the basement where my radio is. Then I’ll run a copper line between it and the other ground rod. Wonder what that’s going to cost me…