On Mon, 12 Aug 2013 20:31:38 +0000 (UTC), Cydrome Leader
wrote:

Jeff Liebermann wrote:
On Mon, 12 Aug 2013 16:37:05 +0000 (UTC), Cydrome Leader
wrote:

It's pretty sad lead acide battery chargers were the most sensitive
devices out of that mix of hardware.

I still don't know exactly what killed all the chargers. I would
expect such high power devices to be built rather rugged, but
apparently, that's not the case.

Very odd. Some sort of fatal design flaw with the regulation parts is what
it sounded like.

Some kind of design error might be a possibility, but why would
charger from various vendors all have the same problem? I wish I had
spent some time doing a post mortem, but I just wanted to get rid of
them and replace them with something that works.

I just gave this a few minutes of though and drew a blank. How do you
directly test to make sure nobody stole your ground?

The only thing I could come up with was run a thin wire along your ground
system in a loop and assume scrappers will steal that too. If that guard
wire of whatever you'd call it opens or goes missing you've triggered an
alarm?

That's exactly what I was thinking and probably the best way.

I could also measure the ground resistance to another nearby ground
rod, and trigger an alarm on any abrupt change in resistance. The
trick will be to design it so that it will survive a lightning strike.

I vaguely recall this being discussed in an article in Above Ground
Level magazine, but don't recall the issue or method.
http://agl-mag.com



--
Jeff Liebermann
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