Earth Tape As Opposed To Rod

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A peripheral earth as the septics call it.

I’ve used 1x⅛” copper tape laid along side the drains. As SW said if you need to join it use “tinmans” hard solder. The icing on the cake was finding a disused gas main. I welded a stud to the pipe and ran some tape to it. On the joints I used hessian tape and then poured cable compound over it.

At work we used a buried copper mat at some of the remote subs. Most subs used the plant steelwork. Newer subs also used the foundation rebar as an Ufer earth.

Note,

How to annoy the wife, ruin one of her pans melting Trinidite compound.

 
I've had to give up gently warming half tins of Temaxol on the hob so the swarf sinks to the bottom. I like the smell but apparently "it's a kitchen NOT a workshop! "

 
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So out of the blue I've been given a roll of 9mm x 1mm busbar strip. So 9mm2. Length is "umpteen" metres :)

Not sure whether to whack in the as yet to be backfilled water main trench and attach to my existing rod or just weigh it in! I won't be testing it until I backfill. (Still got the CCTV duct to lay too).

 
Check BS 7430 out as a starting point.

You can do this and do it well, and just because you have a TT does not mean you must have RCD's, IF your TT earth is reliable...

30m of earth tape, and 3 or more rods is pretty reliable! ;)


So ho would you define 'reliable'? I think the lowest rod resitance I've seen was about 2 Ohms on  a wet  winters day and TN-C-S allows 0.8 Ohms max. The possibility of dispensing with 100mA Type S rcd protecting tails to a metal board filled with RCBOs is rather appealing to me, it seems daft to RCBO everything then have a single RCD, the whole point of using RCBOs being to avoid sharing an RCD.

 

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