+3v out of the ground wire??

[flatcat]

Hi there
An oddity, here.
My horses and goats were dodging the water trough, which has a floating deicer.
Long story short, turned out the ground was putting out a little current. A tech guy from the deicer manufacturer said it could be a poor ground [this is in the barn, whose panel runs off a 30A line from the house a hundred feet away and is grounded by a rod], or could actually be coming from the power company. Some remark on the web said the latter also.
This was not happening last year.

Solution was a pigtail into the extension cord, with a separate ground rod.

But what the heck is this, and do I need to do anything about it generally?

Mostly curious.

Flatcat

 

[KAS1]

NO BUDGET= Isolate until budget allows fixing

 

[flatcat]

What's that? Send the horses to Florida for the winter?

 

[Marvo]

It's all relative, if you find an experienced electrician with decent test equipment he'll take probably less than an hour to come up with a list of what needs doing and in what priority. Treating symptoms is going going to work out a lot more expensive and a lot of the work you do may be unnecessary.

I don't know what it's like up north but I stayed in Brunswick Ga for a couple of years and the local farmers would pay in meat for pump and machine repairs. Find a sparky who's happy to barter.

 

[RogertheBodger]

Quite a choice for your horses, winter in Florida or electrocution, I know which I would choose. Get out there with a hammer and break the ice so they can drink, what did people do before electric deicers?

 

[christof30]

It seems odd that a a device that is designed to sit in a drinking trough is not competely insulated from the water, are you sure the de-icer is not faulty.

 

[flatcat]

Things here seemed to be getting away from elec-tech and into the personal and antagonistic; not what I enjoy.

To answer the previous post, our dog buckets, for instance, have the heaters enclosed under the floor of the bucket; horse troughs use immersion heaters. I have no idea why resistance metal which is heating because a current is passing through it does not pass current into the water, but obviously by design they don't. Ask someone here for the theory.
When I observed the problem this year, first thing I did was assume the deicer was bad and buy another one; problem remained. Wasn't the deicer.

For the record, electrician came out today and found that both panels in the barn were poorly grounded (what I was pursuing). He corrected it. Found same thing in the house panel, and explained to me how to fix it.

I have also made an enclosure to protect the juncture between ext. cord and deicer, soldered the ground wire to the pigtail lug, and added a clamp to the trough ground rod, though the latter setup is presumably no longer needed.