Sorry i havent been around much, these 14 hour days are killing me, but i guess it beats the alternative. Anyway, here's my question.

I am doing a small shopping center that will have five seperate UG services (three 200A 3ph, one 400A 3ph and one 200A 1ph). The poco would not allow me to set each service at the back of the stores due a detention pond that runs behind half of the building. So i have to pipe to the xfmr pad and and set the cans in a bank.

With all these services having less than a foot between them, how should i handle my driven rod? Drive one per service even though the rods would be about 40" apart, or drive two rods or more and form a grid keeping them 6' apart and thermo-weld them together.

I dunno, never had to group my meters so close before.

arseegee

Your going to supply this building with 5 sets of underground service conductors? If so I feel this would be a violation of 230.2 and also surprised your POCO is willing to do this. You should bring one set of service conductors to the building and then tap off for each meter.

You do not need to drive a separate ground rod for each service. You are required to connect each of these services to the same grounding electrodes. 250.58

Why don't you use a 3 section switchboard? Pull Section - 400A Meter Section - 4 200A Meters Section

Curt

[This message has been edited by caselec (edited 05-30-2003).]

Curt, this is a multiple occupancy building with 2hr firewall seperations between the buildings. I wanted to install a trough and tap the services individually but the POCO engineer is requiring me to pipe each lateral to the xfmr. There is no winning an arguement around here with the engineering office at the POCO. Trust me i have tried. Thanks for your info.

One Electrode system of sufficient size per the largest service entrance conductor should be fine.
Bond each service section to this electrode system via an appropriately sized grounding electrode conductor - according to the size of the service feeder going to that section's KWH meter clip.

How does this sound to everyone??? Should I elaborate more???

Scott

Thanks Scott.

arseegee — One reason for individual utility service laterals is to limit fault current at the service entrance.

[There may be supporting discussion in one of the 1980’s NEC preprints about it.]