mnelectric
Member
- Location
- brainerd mn usa
(for purposes of this post i am speaking mainly of dwellings) Recently in my area the utilities have been requiring us to set a disconnect directly under the meter socket, with thier intention being to keep people out of the meter sockets when adding onto the service. The problem we have been having as a result is that now we have established the service at the pole, usually several hundred feet from the dwelling. So now we have to run a fourth wire to keep grounds and neutrals isolated, as they are bonded at the pole. So we have typical intallation 200 amp feeders into the panel in the house with a #4 aluminum underground cable as the ground. This doesnt seem like a very good ground fault current path to me, any fault has to run through that #4 aluminum several hundred feet before getting back to the source. Worst of all and my main concern is that we get a lot of gophers, or frost breaking underground conductors. It wouldnt take much to cut off a #4 aluminum, and if that happened there would be no way to clear a fault, and no way to know if it was cut off until someone got hurt or worse. Any ideas on how to remedy this situation? I was thinking maybe a Non fused disconnect under the meter instead? Most power companys have thier own meters with the main disconnect built into them so that wouldnt work, but just a thought, anyone else running into this problem?