Knowledge Center

If you operate or maintain an older substation, you may have heard the term "grandfathered" tossed around when discussing OSHA compliance. Perhaps you've been told that because your facility was built decades ago, it doesn't need to meet current 29 CFR 1910.269 requirements—especially the grounding provisions in section (n) and Appendix C Part III. Unfortunately, this common assumption could be putting your workers at serious risk and your organization in regulatory jeopardy.

October 21, 2025

1. Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) Damage. 2. Ground Reference Potential Change Damage. 3. Strikes to Power and Data Lines Causing Surges.

October 10, 2025

In the construction industry, selecting the right electrical grounding company is crucial for ensuring safety and project success. This blog post delves into the key factors you should consider to make an informed decision.

June 25, 2025

At E&S Grounding Solutions, our 22+ years in business represent more than just longevity. They represent the expertise we've cultivated through tackling some of the most challenging engineering problems in grounding, earthing, and electrical safety. Our experience spans a broad range of industries and applications, including step and touch voltage assessments at substations, electromagnetic interference analyses for data centers, and specialized lightning risk assessments.

June 25, 2025

Location of the facility. Construction materials used.

June 25, 2025

Inner Foundation Ring: Embedded within the concrete foundation, this ring bonds directly to the structural steel rebar, creating a unified grounding system throughout the building's foundation. Outer Buried Ring: Installed in direct contact with earth at a minimum depth of 0.5m (20 inches) and at least 1m (3 feet) from the foundation, this ring incorporates ground rods at strategic intervals and serves as the primary electrode system.

June 25, 2025

Continuous flowing current must be contained within insulated conductors. Bare conductors, if used, must be installed on insulators and insulated from earth.

June 25, 2025

It's entirely possible to test both above-ground and below-ground copper grounding and earthing networks without shutting down your site or digging up the soil. Advanced, non-invasive testing techniques can be used to analyze your grounding system's low-impedance ground-fault current paths—critical to site safety—while keeping operations running smoothly. This means you can assess the integrity of your grounding system and determine if improvements are needed, all without impacting your day-to-day activities.

December 17, 2024

As solar energy projects grow in scale, they can cross regulatory thresholds that require them to be treated as power plants. Understanding these critical junctures—typically at 20 MW, 5 MW, and 2 MW—is essential for developers to navigate the complex web of requirements governing grounding design, project timelines, and operational compliance. This blog post will demystify these thresholds and explain when your solar project needs to adhere to power plant rules.

July 24, 2024

Installing (or not installing) a neutral-to-ground bond in your electrical panel is an especially important decision that impacts the electrical safety of the entire facility and all the people that... It’s entirely possible to test both above-ground and below-ground copper grounding and earthing networks without shutting down your site or digging up the soil.

March 21, 2024

IEEE 80 is the definitive standard for the design of grounding systems in AC substations. This article explains the key concepts, including tolerable body current limits, step and touch voltage criteria, and the role of soil resistivity in grounding design.

March 15, 2024

A comparison of the two primary lightning protection standards — NFPA 780 and IEC 62305 — and guidance on which standard to apply for substation lightning protection design.

February 20, 2024

The de facto standard for Lightning Protection in the US is NFPA 780: Standard for the Installation of Lightning Protection Systems. Its Lightning Risk Assessment tool can be found in NFPA 780 Annex L and is broken down into two versions: the first is called the “Simplified Risk Assessment” and the other is the “Detailed Risk Assessment.”

February 8, 2024

A practical guide to conducting Wenner 4-point soil resistivity measurements in the field, including equipment setup, measurement procedures, and common sources of error.

January 10, 2024

Vighnesh asked: Our neutral to earth voltage is fluctuating from 2.5v to 4.5v. We have a separate neutral earthing for UPS and DG and separate body earthing. We also regularly applying salt for earth pits but are unable to resolve our voltage issue. Can you please guide what we can do?

January 1, 2024

Utility-scale solar farms present unique grounding challenges due to their large geographic footprint, distributed inverter topology, and the presence of DC and AC systems on the same site.

December 5, 2023

An introduction to cathodic protection systems for buried metallic structures, including the principles of electrochemical corrosion, impressed current systems, and sacrificial anode systems.

November 18, 2023

Data centers require specialized grounding and bonding systems to protect sensitive electronic equipment, ensure personnel safety, and maintain continuous operation.

October 22, 2023

What Is Electrical Grounding? Electrical grounding or “Grounding” originally began as a safety measure used to help prevent people from accidentally coming in contact with electrical hazards. Think... The best way to protect people from electric shock and equipment from objectionable electrical damage, is to bond all exposed-conductive-parts together and ground/earth them to a single common...

September 21, 2023

Step and touch voltages are the primary cause of electrical fatalities at high-voltage facilities. This article explains the physics of these hazards and the engineering measures used to mitigate them.

September 14, 2023

CDEGS (Current Distribution, Electromagnetic Fields, Grounding, and Soil Structure Analysis) is the most powerful and widely used software for grounding system analysis.

August 30, 2023

Before we begin, we should really do a quick review of the definition of “ground” or “earth” in electrical terms and what it really means to us. If you think back to your days in school, you may have heard the term “earth or mass” thrown about when discussing grounding and earthing. Ringing any bell

April 22, 2022

Soil resistivity testing is the single most critical factor in electrical grounding design. This is true when discussing simple electrical design, to dedicated low-resistance grounding systems, or to the far more complex issues involved in Ground Potential Rise (GPR) studies.

April 13, 2022

What is the Best Definition for Ground or Earth? **Grounding** and **Earthing** are two terms that are often used interchangeably in the electrical industry. However, they have distinct meanings and applications. Understanding the difference between them is crucial for ensuring the safety and proper functioning of electrical systems.

January 31, 2022

Projects where the physical location of the buried grounding system is not even considered when thinking about the future above grade connections that will eventually be needed. Projects where columns and footings that could have been utilized for lightning protection down conductors and grounding electrodes for a few dollars in materials, end up costing the client thousands later just to have ugly external LPS installations with less overall benefit to the client. Projects with extensive steel rebar networks installed in concrete just inches below the floor of robotic factories not being utilized as a low-cost and highly-effective equipotential grid for fractions of the cost of installing an equipotential grid above-grade later.

October 5, 2021

The National Electrical Code (NEC) is a vast and complex document. Even electrical engineers and electrical inspectors who spend most of their working hours inside the book will argue against anyone having a perfect understanding of these critically important standards. This “imperfect understanding” of such an important document is caused by a number of factors related to any document whose contents are decided by committee, but we can squarely take aim at Article 100 “Definitions” as the starting point for much of the confusion.

September 29, 2021

Now, I must go to my boss, get special permission to hire these experts (which will take weeks), fill out a small mountain of paperwork, Once these experts are on board, it will take hours of my time getting them up to speed on the job, just to get a formal report with results that I will then have to integrate back into our system.

August 23, 2021

A 14-year-old boy recently died in Texas after “stepping in a puddle” that had a submerged extension cord running through it. There had been heavy thunderstorms that week and the South Texas region was experiencing heavy flooding that submerged an extension cord that was powering a mobile home.

June 28, 2021

Bond. The electrical interconnection of conductive parts designed to maintain a common electric potential. Ground. A conducting connection between an electric circuit or equipment and the earth, or to some conducting body that serves in place of the earth.

May 25, 2021

Neutral wires are hazardous-live-parts; that is, they are normally current-carrying conductors that carry the same amount of electrical current as our hot wires. Within our electrical codes, neutral wires are treated exactly the same as hot wires: they are insulated and made inaccessible to people. Ground (or Protective Earth) wires are normally non-current-carrying conductors and are designed to be the low-impedance, fault-current path during accidental fault conditions.

May 12, 2021

There is a persistent myth that installing a lightning protection system on a structure will increase the likelihood of that structure being struck and damaged, however, this is simply not true.

February 17, 2021

The purpose of a ground test well is two-fold: to be able to quickly and easily measure resistance-to-ground of the grounding electrode and/or to measure point-to-point continuity (resistance) from one electrode to another. The first part, resistance-to-ground, is a measurement of the total resistance to the flow of electricity that the earth is providing against the ground system under test.

October 28, 2020

The standard driven rod or copper-clad rod consists of an 8 to 10 foot length of steel with a 5 to 10-mil coating of copper. This is by far the most common grounding device used in the field today.

October 25, 2020

Jeff asked:Can I weld any steel rebar or are there specific grades to look for? Our Answer:Not all rebar can be welded, particularly with the exothermic welding process as it must be able to heat the...

August 17, 2020

If your electrical panel is a subpanel, then NO, you do not make a neutral-to-ground connection. If your electrical panel is the first service disconnect point, AND the utility has only provided normally current carrying conductors (phase and neutral wires), then YES, you must make a neutral-to-ground connection.

August 9, 2020

Jack Asked:Do I need a grounded conductor (neutral) in my subpanel if all my loads are all 220v (i.e. 2-phase)? Sourav Asked:A client is asking for an insulated copper conductor on a ground grid at a depth of 2’ from the grade level instead of bare copper due to corrosion issues. We are trying to model and...

December 18, 2019

Mohammad asked: What Is An Acceptable Earth Ground Resistance Value, 5 Ohm Or 25 Ohm?

December 10, 2019

Grounding is the process of electrically connecting any metallic object to the earth by the way of an earth electrode system. The National Electric Code requires that the grounding electrodes be...

December 6, 2019

Question: We have a grounding conductor coming from a ground rod that is concrete-encased. It comes up through the concrete slab in a PVC sleeve. Is this PVC sleeve required to extend above the finished floor?

November 20, 2019

The amount of amperage running through the tested system must be below the equipment manufacturer’s limits. The test signal must be injected at the proper location, so that the signal is forced through the grounding system and into the earth.

June 5, 2019

The best way to protect people from electric shock and equipment from objectionable electrical damage, is to bond all exposed-conductive-parts together and ground/earth them to a single common... Recently (May 4, 2021) a news article on grounding issues with the Boeing 737 MAX seemed to appear in most media outlets as a significant news story. Boeing did the right thing by suspending nearly a...

May 8, 2019

What Is Electrical Grounding? Electrical grounding or “Grounding” originally began as a safety measure used to help prevent people from accidentally coming in contact with electrical hazards. Think of it as a master fail-safe for your electrical system.

April 23, 2019

Grounding is the process of electrically connecting any metallic object to the earth by the way of an earth electrode system. The National Electric Code requires that the grounding electrodes be...

January 23, 2019

A client is asking for an insulated copper conductor on a ground grid at a depth of 2’ from the grade level instead of bare copper due to corrosion issues. We are trying to model and analuze the grounding system using SKM Ground Grid software which does not differenciate between insulated & bare conductors.

January 8, 2019

Milan asked: How do I calculate the fault current an electrical substation grounding design? I am trying to understand how to design a substation grounding system and fault current is something I am not getting. For example, for a small substation with some transformers, if there is a fault in the system how will the fault current flow into the grounding system?

October 30, 2018

Ground / Earthing rods (electrodes) are typically comprised of steel with a thin coating of copper or zinc (galvanized) to protect the steel from excessive corrosion.

September 17, 2018

What is the minimum size of a down conductor for lightning protection? Per NFPA 780, stranded copper conductors must be at least 57,400 circular mils (187 lbs/1000 ft). Aluminum conductors must be at least 98,600 cir. mils (95 lbs/1000 ft). Secondary and bonding conductors require a minimum of 26,240 cir. mils for copper and 41,100 cir. mils for aluminum.

August 22, 2018

What Is Electrical Grounding? Electrical grounding or “Grounding” originally began as a safety measure used to help prevent people from accidentally coming in contact with electrical hazards. Think... Dan Asked:How do I run a 120 volt AC feeder from the main service panel (30 Amps) to a subpanel in a garage? Do I need to carry the ground wire in the feeder cable to the subpanel ground, which is...

August 16, 2018

In a main panel, the neutral bar and the ground bar are bonded together. This means that the neutral wire and the ground wire are connected at the same point. However, in a sub-panel, the neutral bar and the ground bar must be separated.

August 3, 2018

Yes, you must bond your Lightning Protection System (LPS) to your all other grounding systems at your facility. Failure to do so would be a major violation under every known standard and regulation we are aware of. While it seems counter-intuitive to bring lightning energy into your other grounding systems, it is more important that there are no differences in potential between the two systems.

July 18, 2018

A one-time commissioning inspection procedure for the new grounding system. A 9-month interval maintenance check conducted by on-site personnel which should also be used after known storms and electrical failures. A 3 to 5-year intensive inspection/audit conducted by a qualified 3rd party electrical grounding company.

June 16, 2018

Earth Potential = Soil Resistivity x Current / (2 x PI x Distance) Soil resistivity data from a Soil Resistivity Test

March 6, 2018

What Is Electrical Grounding? Electrical grounding or “Grounding” originally began as a safety measure used to help prevent people from accidentally coming in contact with electrical hazards. Think...

March 3, 2018

R= Resistance p= soil resistivity L = Length of the rod a= radius of the rod ln= natural log s = rod spacing

November 11, 2017

Possibility of over amperage if phases are not aligned properly. Cannot adjust breakers at later dates due to phase alignment issues. Safety hazard for personnel when servicing the equipment as neutral wires may still be “hot” even after the proper lockout/tagout procedures have been implemented.

October 26, 2017

Vighnesh asked:Our neutral to earth voltage is fluctuating from 2.5v to 4.5v. We have a separate neutral earthing for UPS and DG and separate body earthing. We also regularly applying salt for earth...

September 11, 2017

In a properly designed circuit, if a fault were to occur on the 120-volt outlet between the hot-wire and the ground, the current will flow through ground wire back to the main panel, where it will move to the neutral wire via the neutral-to-ground bond, up to the utility transformer, back down the hot wire to the circuit breaker, tripping the breaker. In a faulty designed circuit, if a fault were to occur on the 120-volt outlet between the hot-wire and the ground, the current will flow through ground wire back to the main panel, where because it does not have a neutral-to-ground bond, the current will be forced through the ground rod, into and across the earth, and up the utility ground rod and into the utility transformer, back down the hot wire to the circuit breaker.

August 3, 2017

A Lightning Risk Assessment Only – No need for us to visit the site, we can gather all of the required information via electronic means and phone calls. This will provide you with a recommended protection level (LPS I through IV) and types of surge protection needed for your incoming services (electrical, telco, etc.).

June 6, 2017

Calculating the voltage variations across a ground grid is a critical step in ensuring the safety and reliability of electrical systems. The process involves a detailed analysis of the soil resistivity, the geometry of the ground grid, and the magnitude of the fault current. The primary goal is to keep the step and touch voltages within safe limits to protect personnel from electric shock hazards during a fault event.

April 7, 2017

Our Answer:The difference in voltage between the neutral to the ground at any point in your electrical system should be very low, typically something less than one (1) volt. This is easily measured... Ground Potential Rise (GPR) or Earth Potential Rise is a phenomenon that occurs when large amounts

February 2, 2017