what's up everyone I got a good question uh from a different video it was a comment under
the video from Clark Chambers what about having a separate ground rod for each sub panel he was
asking on the video uh why do we Bond at the service panel and not at the sub panel [Music]
so if you recall from that video I talk about actually bonding our neutrals and our grounds
together let me get a different color on here so the point at which our ground rod hits Earth it
could be a concrete encased electrode it could be a ground rod ground ring there's all kinds of
different things that we can use to establish our connection with Earth but in this case we
have a ground rod that's connecting our the rest of the premises wires wiring system to Earth and
we're bonding the neutral all neutrals need to go back to the main neutral so that we can
complete a circuit if we have a fault and that'll actually trip a breaker but I was talking about
how we have different sub panels right you can run more circuits over and you just have to make
sure you run an equipment grounding conductor not a grounding electric conductor an equipment
grounded conductor to each one of the panels that he was asking what about having a separate ground
rod for each panel can you do that and the answer is yeah I mean you can put as many ground rods
into anything as you want you can put 17 ground rods like if you're out at your service and you
want out here to run like a whole crapload of ground rods that's totally fine you can't make
them any closer than six feet apart you have to make them further than six feet apart and
I believe there's even an informational note that says that uh double the length of the rod is like
the most effective way of doing it but there's no difference in doing this than there is in
just running ground rods from other panels where it becomes tricky is you can't bond your ground
in your neutral at each one of the panels because that gives you objectionable current potentially
you have two different paths that current can take you could have a short go through the equipment
grounding conductor and go through the neutral and now the equipment grounding conductor is
touching everything metal so current's always going to take all paths back to Source right
you always have the saying of current's always going to take the the least resistant path to
ground no it's going to take all paths that it has and it's going to take them in proportion
to the amount of resistance or impedance that's offered to that current flow so if you have seven
conductors that are all connecting to each other and each one's a little bit smaller a little bit
bigger conductors you're going to end up having current take multiple different paths but the
amount of current that's going to take each path is going to be dependent on how much is
resistance it can get but if it's a complete circuit it's still going to take that either
way so you don't want to give it multiple paths between all these different panels so just make
sure if you're going to have supplementary ground rods which is allowed by code however many of them
you want just don't connect them to neutral at any of the subpanels just make sure each
ground rod goes to the ground bus has an equipment grounding conductor that goes to the next panel
you got an equipment grounding electrode conductor that goes down to the ground bar for the next one
that it's connected to the equipment grounding conductor and the only place that you make a bond
to neutral is still at the service super super important but yes look up supplementary ground
rods in article 250 and it'll say like you can put them in you you can have supplemental ground rods
they're not required in some instances and if you do use them you do these but it never says that
you can't use more of them so you just always have to remember that the national electrical code is
a minimum standards guideline it's just this is the bare minimums if you want to run way bigger
conductors if you want to put you know like more protection on something you're absolutely okay to
do that but code definitely specifies that you do not make that neutral to ground Bond except at the
service disconnecting means so good question dude thank you so much see you guys in the next one