Electric water heaters are quite powerful household appliances that are installed in apartments and private homes. To avoid electric shock, which is hazardous if the wiring is damaged, the water heater must be earthed.

Why you need to ground

The water heater is constantly in contact with water, and water, if it is not only distilled, perfectly conducts the current. Violation of electrical insulation can lead to a person who is taking a bath or washing dishes, will be shocked. The consequences of a stroke may not just be painful, but even fatal. It happens that an electric current hits the nervous system, and a person loses memory, labor skills, the ability to learn.

If a breakdown occurs on the housing, then anyone who touches the water heater without rubber gloves will be shocked.

The second reason why it is necessary to make grounding in an apartment is connected with wandering currents. Wandering currents occur in the metal parts of the water heater. If they are not removed, they will contribute to corrosion and destruction of metal elements. In addition, they are felt by man. Many people know the feeling of easy tingling from the impact of a weak current.

In a private house or dacha, grounding can save an electric water heater from a lightning strike during a thunderstorm.It will take a hit on yourself, having conducted a current in the ground, and your boiler will remain unscathed.

Principles of grounding

The easiest way to make the water heater grounded in an apartment is to connect its housing with a wire with a metal part in contact with the ground. This may be a riser pipe, a heating system or an armature part of the structure.

Since today many people install plastic pipes, it is necessary to check whether there are such inserts on the riser. To do this, walk through the apartments, ask neighbors from the top and bottom. The presence of large areas of plastic will reduce the grounding to none.

Modern electrical devices have ground contacts on the housing.Look at your home appliance and find them. In addition to grounding the enclosure, you should take care of the presence of a special outlet with three leads.

• Install the outlet with the grounding wire. It should be located at a distance of 80 cm or more from the floor and 50 cm or less from the installation site of the heater.
• If the house still uses old two-wire wiring, it must be replaced with a three-core wiring with copper wires. The cable is laid from the shield on the platform to the outlet. The shield must be grounded.
• You can lay the cable in a plastic box or patch the walls, which is much heavier, but more reliable.
• After that, the apartment is de-energized and the cable is connected to the outlet. Pay attention to the color of the cores. The colors of the wires will help to connect the phase and earth correctly.
• Then connect the cable to the shield. When ground is connected, use a grounding bolt.

Sometimes, if there is no ground in the house, people use the boiler only when it is off. First they heat the water, and then turn off the device and wash. But all the time remembering this is quite tiring, besides, always someone can forget about precaution. It is better to lay the grounding cable.

We also advise you to purchase high-quality boilers with reliable insulation of the TEN. This minimizes the probability of a breakdown.

Grounding in a private house

How to ground the water heater in the apartment, we just found out. Now we will deal with the private house. Here, the grounding will have to be built with our own hands.

Near the house at a distance of more than, m from the blind area, choose a piece of land on which will be installed 3 iron pins of about 2 m in length and a diameter of not less than 15 mm. They will act as electrodes.

Instead of pins, you can take corners or pipes 4 mm thick or larger. People and animals should not walk in the chosen place.

After that, they carry out earthworks, digging trenches in the form of a triangle, in the corners of which there will be electrodes. Another trench will go from one corner to the house. Each side of the triangle should be more than 3 meters.

To one side of each electrode, bolts of m10 or m8 are welded.The other side of them is driven into the ground so that they look out 5 cm outwards.

Then in the wall of the house at a distance of about 2 m from the flap and not too close to the floor (5-10 cm from it) drill a hole with a perforator. Screw the steel wire 6 mm in diameter to the terminal on the body of the water heater and lay the wire along the wall, leading through the hole and then along the trench to the welded bolt.

A washer is thrown onto the bolt, a coil of wire is wound, another washer is put on and tightly twisted. The wire is stretched along the contour through two other pins and looped. Instead of a wire, you can use a profile, welding it to the electrodes. When you hold the gasket and fill the trenches, check the loop resistance. It must be less than 4 ohms.

Video about connecting the boiler with your own hands

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Do not neglect such trifles as grounding. Only at first glance it seems that this is not so significant a question, but one day it can save your health or even life. This is really a decent fee for little worries during connection.