Earth Grounding Solar Panels

welcome to the land of House channel I'm Seth I've got nine kilowatts of solar as you can see behind me two arrays are hooked up to my off-grid system and one array is going to my grid tie system well a couple of days ago we had a lightning storm and my off-grid system blinked and that's not good so I'm hoping that putting a ground rod to Earth ground this system is going to fix that issue so that's what we're going to be doing today let's stop over here real quick and see what we can't do about putting this grounding rod in and getting both of these arrays Earth grounded each solar panel has a hole here on the end which is a grounding hole and you'll notice I have mounted this to Unistrut which is a metal channel so I've got my multimeter here I'm going to set this to the ohms meter or continuity here so when this touches something that is the same it beeps so if I were to say touch this bolt here and this bolt here it's the same electrically but if I touch the frame which has a coating on it and this nothing so I have to actually touch inside of the grounding hole and then here and it is the same piece because inside of the mounting screws here or mounting holes it's touching the panel and then here it's also the panel itself so what I want to do to ground this is either link these holes together or link the unit strut together and I have to go through and test each panel so this one down here Yep this one up here yep and then I'll go over here to this other side over here I also have to link this panel to this panel because if I test continuity between in here and here there's not or this side of the unit strut to this side there's no continuity so I need to have a jumper wire that goes from this panel to this panel or this unit strut to this unit strut to link these together and that way it'll be one solid panel all the way down as far as ground is concerned I'm going to ground from right here to right here on these panels and that should link this whole side to this whole side right here I've got my little wire stripper that I can make a loop in my wire there hopefully you can see that and then I can stick a small threaded bolt in there we've got a washer on here too to help hold that in place all right I'm going to stick this into this hole and then get the nut on the back very good that should be tight enough on that one move over here give myself an extra inch or so for that Loop likewise just put this bolt in there there we go now let's check for continuity now if I were to check from this unit strut to this one we have continuity which means we are now ready to move on to the next set of panels and then we'll be ready to put our grounding rod in the ground I went around with my multimeter and check continuity and we are good to go on every panel across this array so now I've got an eight foot grounding rod and a sledge hammer and I am slowly tapping this into the ground hopefully it gets easier as I am able to hold this Hammer a little bit better but for now I'm just giving it a tap until I get this down into the ground so hey I thought about putting a bucket out here to get above this grounding rod but the ground is so uh uneven that I don't know I'll just go for this I feel like if this was a SpongeBob episode it would say two hours later and then I would hit for a few minutes one eternity liter I thought to myself I'll step outside and put both those rounding rods in real quick now I'll put one in go to the house it's about to storm anyhow so I want to get this down here all right I finally got that grounding rod all the way down there let's go ahead and use this right here to go around that pole and lock it down so I can get this grounded give myself an extra little bit there we go stick that down in there okay well that means I am officially grounded the other end of the wire I did the same as before just took one of those little nuts and bolts and locked that down to the panel all right and that's how I'm going to ground my solar array now I do have two more arrays behind me and I'm going to ground those to the same grounding rod because they both go to the same mppt charge controller if you've got some comments leave those down below and thanks for watching I'm gonna go sit on the couch for a minute because I am pretty warm I'm Seth with Landa house and I will see you in the next video and bye

Channel: Land to House

Views: 23,655

Keywords: land to house, land two house, diy solar, solar panels, off grid, off grid solar, solar power, solar panel, solar panel grounding, diy solar panel system, diy solar system, how to ground solar, how to ground solar panels, how to ground solar system, how to ground solar panel system, how to ground solar array, earth ground solar

Id: wNz2D7PLbLo

Length: 6min 19sec (379 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 16 2023