Not the dirt. Well, actually the dirt looks fine, although quite sandy. What I mean is that the electrical ground for the house looks good.

A little background. As you may or may not know, we are building an electrical quiet house for “reasons” (which do not involve doing radio astronomy in our living room, but they could, so you can assume that reason if it makes you sleep easier). (Actually the real reasons do include sleeping easier, so there is that.) Anyway, the last piece of the puzzle is to make sure that the path from the house’s electrical system to ground has as little resistance as possible.

To achieve this, we have a super secret geometric pattern of grounding rods (a triangle with precise spacing) connected with large gauge wire and eventually buried under the driveway. (One of the earlier designs used a pentagram wiring pattern, but fortunately it turns out that three rods are enough, which minimizes the chances of eldritch beings accidentally appearing in our driveway.) Before we proceeded to fill in the dirt and pave the driveway, we had to be sure that the ground rod installation was sufficient. This meant using a metering device that the electrician did not own (until now) and then sending the measurements to an EMF specialist for review.

Here is what a connection to one of the three grounding rods looks like. This is designed to continue to have a good connection for a long time (so we do not have to dig up the driveway in the future).

And here is one of the measurements of the resistance to ground. I do not claim to understand how this meter works (even though I have a degree in electrical engineering). But I believe that when the electrician sends a series of pictures to the consultant and the consultant says it looks good, then we are good. The goal, by the way, is to have as low a resistance as possible. And, our target is actually quite a bit more challenging that required by code for more residential buildings.

There was concern since our soil is sand and sand is not a great conductor. But it looks like it is good enough. So this afternoon the landscaping company should fill in the trenches dug in the driveway and soon after that we will get the driveway paved.

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