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I connected every panel ground to the same rod for 8 years, until a lightning strike proved me wrong
Tbh I always ran all my grounds to one rod because it was faster and I never saw an issue. Last month a customer near Tulsa called after a storm, their panel was fried and the surge took out their thermostat too. The senior guy on the call pulled up my install pics and pointed out I was creating a ground loop, which can actually invite more damage. He showed me how splitting the grounds across two rods spaced 12 feet apart stops that. Has anyone else been doing single-rod grounding and had a weird failure they didn't connect at first? I'm wondering if we need to standardize this in our local group.
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mason3611mo ago
Man I gotta be honest, I was the exact same way for years. Single rod, zip tied everything together, never had a problem so I figured why change it. But then I read about how that setup can basically backfeed energy through the return path during a hit, and it clicked why some of my older jobs had weird gremlins like flickering lights or a random fried board months after a storm. I always blamed the equipment, never my own install. This post honestly got me to go back and look at my own wiring on a couple of those jobs and yeah, the senior guy is right. Now I'm splitting grounds on every new build, even if it takes an extra hour. It's one of those things where you don't see the damage until it's real bad, and by then it's too late.
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