We have been installing the canopy now for almost one year. At first it was like a nightmare as we just couldn’t seem to get it together. After some hard lessons learned, we are now on track and moving forward and even in the right direction. I did a site survey yesterday. The unit installed at the customer home is a local competitor, one man operation… Customer states that he does not want to see any of the wiring outside of his house and would prefer we use what is the wiring that is installed now. One man operator installed all his wiring inside the walls of the home and the unit does not appear to be grounded and is run with unshielded CAT 5 from the equipment to the router in the attic. I explained to customer that our typical install is shielded Cat 5 from the radio to the grounding block and unsheilded from the grounding block to one egress point into the house and explained why. He doesn’t want to see the wire and will pay extra for the increase in the install time “IF” we do the wiring internally. This includes the grounding wire. Has anyone ever run grounding wire inside a wall? I am not a master electrican by any stretch of the imagination, but placing the grounding wire inside a wall sounds like a big time no-no! Any thoughts? If we get this customer on line, there is an excellent chance we will get a very large part of this subdivision, no other competition except the one guy and the rumor is he is not a reliable connection. I am leaning toward the following: A. Install using the current wiring concept and have customer sign a waiver that he understands this is not the correct configuration; B. Tell the customer we will not wire the grounding wire inside he house because we are not comfortable with the safety of this procedure; OR, C. We will do our standard install, take it or leave it.
C - but say it in the nicest way possible.
Something like:
"Sir, the ground wire cannot go inside the walls. Doing so is in direct violation of the National Electric Code. No signed waiver will suffice. We would love to have you as a customer but not if we will be in violation of the NEC"
You could bring the cable from the radio to under the eave, drop the ground wire to the cold water pipe, and then take the unshielded into the attic through the vent. That way only the ground wire is showing. You might be able to use a white wire so it does not show too much.
Thanks, I called today and stated pretty much what you said. I will got out on Tuesday to do a rough sketch of what we will do and told him that either he takes our advice and we will install for him, he signes a waiver stating that he accepts full responsiblity for an ungrounded antenna. We would not do the inside install of the grounding wire because if it were struck by lightening, it would be a very bad thing to have the wire inside the wall, and we just weren’t going to go there. Or he can decline service. He chose to look at the rough sketch of what we will do for him and then decide. Thanks for the reply though. I didn’t state code, but alluded to the fact that it was very dangerous and we would not participate in anything we thought to be dangerous for our customers.
If you are in an area where you get ground strikes you cannoy leave the ground off.
Sorry , I could not understand this from Jerry.
"If you are in an area where you get ground strikes you cannoy leave the ground off."
Does that mean that if we are likely to get lightening strokes , then we should not connect Ground wires…to earth pits & stuff like that…?
If you get lightning strikes, you have to ground.
Out here in the SF Bay Area we don’t see ground strikes and so we don’t bother with the ground. We’re just lazy hippies.
We have had nothing but problems with the 300 unit especially within a few miles of AM radio broadcast antennas. With the ground connected we see poor download speeds like 100k. Remove the ground and get over 3000k. We talked to the engineers at Moto and they acknowledged the problem and sent us some new test units that were about 50/50. AM isnt the only culprit.
We dont ground any of our units where we are, we havent had a problem yet, by now its going to be way cheaper to just replace a radio then it would be to include a ground wire in the install. We ground all of our AP’s tho