styropyro
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grounding and eye searing goodness
🕑 Added 2023-01-14 17:24:28 +0000 UTCI hammered in an 8ft grounding rod outside my shop the other day, and although it sucked to do, it's allowed me to bring some of my fun plasma devices outside. It seemed to improve the output of my monster vacuum tube tesla coil, while also preventing back feeding big RF voltages onto my mains wiring.
Grounding is a surprisingly complicated subject when it comes to tesla coils and RF. Normally when you ground something using mains ground, it means you are locking it to 0 volts. However, when dealing with high frequencies, the sheer length of wire between the device and the actual connection to the earth introduces problems, due to the parasitic inductance. This means the wire connecting these two points can develop a huge voltage across it when switching big currents at high frequencies, like what happens with some tesla coils. In fact, a piece of foil on the floor often acts as a better tesla coil ground than using mains ground, simply because the foil is a physically closer source of charge.
I'm sure an electrician would have a stroke seeing the wiring choices I've made, but the outcome is hard to beat for what I'm doing.
Comments
Tyler Hargrove
I guess what I am thinking is that the brines could act just like his jars of brine he was using as capacitors^^
Tyler Hargrove
You should look at a surface to depth resistivity log. Also have you read about the Tesla coil in Milford Texas, which is like 20 mile from where I live. They were talking about using Zeneck Surface waves, whatever that is. I always thought Tesla was trying to use the brines in the shallow well under the coil to complete the circuit that way. Resistivity increases almost logrithmically with brine saturation with depth in most places. Its how we find oil with wireline logs. Some of the brines at depth of around 2500 to 3500 ft in the Permian Basin have 250,000 ppm salt concentrations, and once when I was installing some equipment into the outflow pipe on a rig, getting soaked in that water which was making stalagtites off the lines, I was electrically charged and shocked the shit out of myself opening the camper door. Then shocked the shit out of myself repeatedly while taking a shower to remove the salt lol. So theres a lot of things that can be done with the aquifers is my point....
Sean Daggett
When the electrician comes to inspect your work, mount a metal pinwheel next to the line and tell him you countered the voltage with magnetic flux. Film the reaction.
