Establishing service location

[meternerd]

POCO comments

POCO comments

As a utility guy, I only know what we require. First, we do not supply the service panel. We only supply the meter. We do, however, have requirements for the service. We require a disconnect after the meter and adjacent to the meter. No disconnects are allowed ahead of the meter, because that then becomes an unmetered, unprotected section, which requires seals, etc. It's called "old sequence". New sequence is meter, disconnect, load. In the old days, the meter was on the outside of the house, but there was no access to the disconnect inside. Pulling a meter under load can be a recipie for disaster, so the new rules are a disconnect accessible to the power company. Code requires the bond to be in the "main disconnect enclosure" so it would have to be at the pole. Any further bonding of neutral and ground is prohibited. Parallel paths, yada yada yada!

I know a lot of customers prefer the meter out at the "street", but they are made aware of the fact that anything past the meter is the customer's responsibility. If there is a fault in the underground service from the meter, it can get pretty expensive if they are footing the bill instead of the POCO. Just food for thought.

 

[kwired]

i guess my biggest concern is that if you have the bond at the pole remote of the house, you could potentially lose your ecg underground and not know it, thus the house would not have an effective ground fault current path back to the source. noone would notice the bond was gone until someone got hurt or worse, i suppose the best solution is just to put the underground in pipe to better protect the conductors, or else start a riot at my local power company

You can lose any EGC and never know it until a problem comes up where it would have been depended on to do its job.

As far as underground conductors failing, I have repaired a lot of underground failures and you hardly ever see neutral or ground conductor fail without some help from physical abuse. The ungrounded conductors have high potential to earth and have a much accelerated deterioration rate from small holes in insulation. I won't say I have never seen a neutral or EGC fail, but is pretty rare without the help of excavating equipment, driving steel fence posts through them, and things of that nature.

 

[mnelectric]

You can lose any EGC and never know it until a problem comes up where it would have been depended on to do its job.

As far as underground conductors failing, I have repaired a lot of underground failures and you hardly ever see neutral or ground conductor fail without some help from physical abuse. The ungrounded conductors have high potential to earth and have a much accelerated deterioration rate from small holes in insulation. I won't say I have never seen a neutral or EGC fail, but is pretty rare without the help of excavating equipment, driving steel fence posts through them, and things of that nature.

true you can lose any ECG and not know but if you lose the one to the pole, you have lost all ECG's on every branch circuit on the service, big difference

 

[robbietan]

As a utility guy, I only know what we require. First, we do not supply the service panel. We only supply the meter. We do, however, have requirements for the service. We require a disconnect after the meter and adjacent to the meter. No disconnects are allowed ahead of the meter, because that then becomes an unmetered, unprotected section, which requires seals, etc. It's called "old sequence". New sequence is meter, disconnect, load. In the old days, the meter was on the outside of the house, but there was no access to the disconnect inside. Pulling a meter under load can be a recipie for disaster, so the new rules are a disconnect accessible to the power company. Code requires the bond to be in the "main disconnect enclosure" so it would have to be at the pole. Any further bonding of neutral and ground is prohibited. Parallel paths, yada yada yada!

I know a lot of customers prefer the meter out at the "street", but they are made aware of the fact that anything past the meter is the customer's responsibility. If there is a fault in the underground service from the meter, it can get pretty expensive if they are footing the bill instead of the POCO. Just food for thought.

added info from another utility guy. we supply 30 meters of cable from the service lines to the meter. any more than 30 meters, we bill the customer. then we require a disconnect near the meter if the meter is located more than 15 feet from the main disconnect. and a grounded conductor connected to a grounding conductor buried beneath the meter.

 

[kwired]

true you can lose any ECG and not know but if you lose the one to the pole, you have lost all ECG's on every branch circuit on the service, big difference

I see your point, but same thing could happen when we have a service disconnect on outside of a building, and a feeder to a panel that is just a few feet away. Lose the EGC for any reason between the service disconnect and the feeder panel and you lose EGC for every circuit supplied by that feeder. This would have still been possible in earlier codes that did not require an EGC to separate buildings and structures.

Also something else that can and does happen if you lose a service grounded conductor (neutral) is a bonded water pipe or any other metallic path between your service and a neighbors becomes the new path and you still don't know you lost the grounded conductor because everything still works.

 

[mnelectric]

I see your point, but same thing could happen when we have a service disconnect on outside of a building, and a feeder to a panel that is just a few feet away. Lose the EGC for any reason between the service disconnect and the feeder panel and you lose EGC for every circuit supplied by that feeder. This would have still been possible in earlier codes that did not require an EGC to separate buildings and structures.

Also something else that can and does happen if you lose a service grounded conductor (neutral) is a bonded water pipe or any other metallic path between your service and a neighbors becomes the new path and you still don't know you lost the grounded conductor because everything still works.

i guess if your water was directly bonded to your neighbors that could become a return path, but main point still is valid, that would be a bad situation. Ideal, have the neutral to ground bond in the service panel where all of the branch circuits derive from. I wish utilitys would be more considerate of code and safty vs. their convenience.

 

[iwire]

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.

You lost me, the distance to the source had not changed.