How To Ground Solar Panels & The Importance Of Grounding
When you're installing a solar panel system, it is extremely important to ground your solar arrays and your equipment. If you experience a large amount of lightening storms in your area, failure to ground your solar system could result in damages to your product.
Just like your electrical outlets in your home, everything is tied together with copper wire. This bare copper wire is buried into the ground or re-bar in your foundation so any stray electrical currents are directed away from your appliances in case of a lightening surge or short circuit.
Electricity will follow the path of least resistance, while it's hard to really know it's path we can take the proper precautions to direct the surge in a path of someplace safer. We will walk you through the steps on how to ground your solar array.
Just like in your home, your PV solar system needs to grounded. This includes all of the equipment connected into the system; inverters, mounting, controllers, and any other equipment that makes up your system.
Here's how we ground our solar water pump systems:
- 1. Drive a grounding rod at least 8 feet deep into the earth near the system.
2. Leave around 6" above ground to properly attach your copper wire to the grounding rod.
3. For outdoor grounding, you need to use thick, bare copper wire that can handle large electrical currents like lightening. Use a clamp to attach the copper wire to the grounding rod.
4. Next, run your wire up your pole mounting system and attach it to the grounding screw we provide in our solar panel mounting systems. As you run the copper wire up the pole mount, use black electrical tape or zip-ties to keep the copper wire attached to the pole.
- 5. Wrap the copper wire around our grounding screw, and tighten the bolt.
6. Trim off any excess copper wire.
This is just a method we use when grounding our solar water pump systems. There are probably many more ways and hundreds of opinions. Please check with your city permits and codes, as they may slightly differ than our city.
For more information about our solar pump systems, or solar mounting systems please visit our products page or give us a call at 866-519-7892!