Don Foreman wrote:
On Fri, 30 Sep 2005 02:46:12 GMT, RoyJ wrote:

Well, the guys doing the line repair to the 8kv line in the last
storm certainly didn't ground that line. They repaired the line by
removing the tree that was on it, flipped in a new fuse and POW!
right in the lineman's face. He dryly observed that there was
probably another tree on the line that they should have checked for.

A nit. Linemen treat ungrounded lines as "hot", and routinly work
with hot 8KV lines. Moot point because local gennys must never
backfeed the grid.

While YOU may do things correctly, I always worry about someone else
that comes along and either buys the property or does it in your
absence. The two that come along fairly regularly on this NG are
hooking up gensets and running welder ciruits. Hooking up gensets
should be intuitive to a "helper" that your wife got to come over
when you were on a trip (or whatever). Welding circuits can be
deliberately overbreakered (as allowed by the NEC) but what happens
when you sell the house, get infirm, or whatever. The NEXT person
uses the circuit for something else.

Perhaps you should have phrased that more generically, as 'the wife"
or "my (Roy's) wife". Mary is quite able to deal with situations
that would customarily be mine to deal with. The converse is also
true. **** happens. Help is often most abundantly available when
least needed.

YMMV. Feel free to worry.

A couple of lifetimes ago when I worked for the Canadian National Railroad
we had a book.
This book was called "the Uniform Code Of Operating Operating Rules (UCOR).
This rule book was a distillate of several centuries of global railroading
experience.
In theory, if all the rules were adhered to nothing could go wrong.
It was (unofficially) understood that if one knew *ALL* the reasons for any
given rule and *ALL* that could go wrong if said rule was broken one could
selectively break it.
Any defect in your reasoning that led to a disaster resulted in (at the
least) brownie points (get enough and it was bye bye job) and at the worst,
jail time.
When I was a greenhorn someone decided to break one of of those rules to
save a couple of seconds.
Rather than seem officious I went along with this.
The result was I almost got six people killed.
It was so close that, to this day, I break out in a sweat just thinking
about it.
And it happened more than thirty years ago!

The moral?
Before you break/bend the rules think long and hard about ALL the possible
consequences.
This is not a 'the towers fell because of an engineering oversight' kind of
thing.
It is a 'the rule was there for a damn good reason' worked out by your
betters.
You might just get away with a non-code installation and you may just get
someone killed, all for the saving of a few miserable dollars.

Regards.
Ken.