Hi Gary,
I used this method a few years back and found that it worked very quickly.
If you use an appropriately sized female garden hose repair coupler,
such as
http://www.homedepot.com/p/Ray-Padula-Metal-5-8-in-Garden-Hose-Female-Thread-Repair-with-Stainless-Steel-Clamps-RP-RIFR-6/205167514
and pound it into a piece of appropriately sized EMT, you'll have the
all that you need. I (lightly) held the EMT in a vice and inserted the
nipple end of the coupler into the EMT. I inserted a ratchet socket
into the female hose end of the coupler and used a hammer to tap the
back of the socket so as to drive the nipple end into the EMT.
To install the ground rod, you simply turn on the water supply and start
driving the 10' stick of EMT into the soil till you reach the desired
depth. Turn off the water supply, remove the EMT and drop your ground
rod. Once I had the rods at the desired depth, I once again used water
to back fill some of the soil that was pushed up out of the hole by the
water. Since I'm in central Florida & the soil is pretty sandy, I found
that refilling the hole around the ground rod works pretty well as
there's a lot of resistance by the ground rod to being pulled back out
by hand after back filling.
I just took a picture of a 1/2" ground rod sitting along side a 10'
piece of 1/2" EMT with the female repair coupler attached and I placed
it on my web site at http://www.w4abc.com/hydrogroundrod.html
73,
Jon Pearl - W4ABC
www.w4abc.com
On 4/23/2014 9:22 AM, Gary Smith wrote:
I used to live in NE Illinois and in southern Louisiana and that's
exactly how I did my long grounding rods. No stones at all to run
into. Here in Connecticut it took a lot of effort to find exact
placement for my HI-Z Rx array, the soil is one big rock with a thin
surface layer dirt on top. Get a few inches down & hit solid.
73,
Gary
KA1J
---
This email is free from viruses and malware because avast! Antivirus protection
is active.
http://www.avast.com
_______________________________________________
_______________________________________________
TowerTalk mailing list
TowerTalk@contesting.com
http://lists.contesting.com/mailman/listinfo/towertalk
|