On Feb 3, 10:44*am, bud-- wrote:
Limp Arbor wrote:
So the ice storm the othe day took down many trees in our area. *My
BIL called me because a branch fell and knocked his neutral wire loose
from the weatherhead. *Some things worked others didn't, biggest
problem was when the fridge kicked on the whole house went dim.

I asked him about a ground rod and he was sure he didn't have one.
Until he could get a guy to climb up there I told him to go get a
ground rod at the Borg and pound it in as far as he could and connect
it to the ground/neutral bar in his panel. *He was able to get the
ground rod about 5' down with a hammer and connected two 12ga copper
wires from the rod to his panel. *After he did this there was no
improvement at all.

An hour later an electrician he knows showed up and reconnected the
neutral to the weaterhead and all was better. *Neither of his hot
leads at the weatherhead were loose or needed to be touched. *So why
wouldn't going directly to ground from the panel have helped his
problem?

As an earthing electrode ground rods suck. A very good resistance to
earth would be 10 ohms. If you connect a hot wire to the rod you get a
current of 12A.

In this case the rod is 5 ft instead of 8 feet. But much worse - it is
in frozen ground. Frozen ground has a much higher resistance than
non-frozen ground.

I would not expect a ground rod to be very effective for an open neutral
in the best case. This was not the best case.

The reason the earthing system might work at all is the N-G bond
required in US services. The earthing system is not intended to be a
substitute neutral.

If the electrode is a water pipe (which is required to be an earthing
electrode if there is 10 ft of metal in the earth), and you have a metal
municipal water system, you can have the neutral current through the
earthing connection to the water service, through the metal water supply
lines to adjacent houses, to the services for those houses, and back to
the utility through the service neutrals in those houses.

You might want to find out how the system is earthed.

--
bud--

As far as supplying electricity to a house a ground rod has no useful
purpose other than saftey. Having one will not replace a broken
neutral, not having one will not effect how well the electrical
distribution in your house functions.

Jimmie