ECN Forum Forums General Topics of the Trade General Discussion Area DC System - Grounding and fusing!

I can help with this as I have designed Telco plants for about 30 years.

It is completely a design issue. You can ground either polarity or none of them. As a general rule here are the standards.

-48 Volt DC plants bond the positive polarity to ground, referred to as return or common. The hot or negative polarities have the OCPD installed.

+12 and +24 Volt DC plants bond the negative polarity to ground, referred to as return or common. The hot or positive polarities have the OCPD installed.

The third option is to float the plant where neither polarity is grounded. In which case ground fault detection is installed and both polarities have OCPD installed. Very rare and very expensive to implement.