2. misc-audio
  3. 172453-20253

Star Grounding and the Home

This comes up a bit so I wanted to talk about it.

 

You may not, for safety reasons, create a separate grounding scheme for appliances fed from the same service. May. Not. Ever. That means that at the service entrance all the grounds and the neutrals must connect, preferably with zero Ohms between them and zero Ohms to the ground rod(s). I say preferably because, corrossion, splices, etc. These are rarely perfect.

 

However, you MAY run an insulated separate ground wire to the ground rods which feed the rest of the home. This is like a star grounding scheme in a piece of audio gear. You meet the code criteria, and you hopefully dissipate noise in the ground wiring of your home at the rod before it can reach your gear. You can achieve a very good version of this by running a sub panel to your audio room.

 

One interesting possibility that I’ve seen some power conditioners hint at is to use a coil with appropriate gauge wiring and low DCR to isolate the gear. This meets the code requirements that it can carry 100% of the current in the event of a short, and the coil blocks noise from the rest of the home. Pricey, cause it requires heavy coils, and because.... audiophiles.

erik_squires

Showing 1 response by tednep

tednep
33 posts
 

1: Maybe i have misunderstod, but here in Denmark we can have 2 ground rods. One for the house installation and one for the hifi (if made correctly)

 

2: Noise ALWAYS travels the shortest way to the rod, then it can spread to the rod with lowest resistance and it also spreads to the rest of the system on its way to the rod if the grounding in your hifi system is not made correct. (noise is not so easy to get rid of)

3: If you connect your isolated ground wire to your house rod, then you can be sure that noice from house appliances get to your hifi system.

4: Make a seperate rod for your hifi and a isolated wire to the rod. Then take a ferrit core an clip on the wire the first place it is connected to another groundwire. The hifi rod can actually recive noice from other houses in the area if your rod have the lowest resistance in that area.

You can overdo the ferric core (too much) becaurse: the bigger ferrit core, the bigger impact on the total resistance. Just try out how manny ferrit cores you want on the isolated ground rod wire and listen. When the music starts to sound borring, take some off again. You can do this on the hot wire too. In my experience it is not nessesary on the neutral wire. Unless you live in a industrial area, but even then....

Do this first and you have a solid "platform" for the ground rod in your hifi rig to "build further on" (sorry for my english)

Regards

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