How are you grounding Ethernet surge protection?
Bonus question IF APPLICABLE: how are you upgrading the building/home grounding/ground rods/ground grid
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- connect to the ground wire of your power or use a grounded outlet
- contact your power company, otherwise a certified electrician
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I asked a guy here once because I know I don’t know and everyone pretty much agreed, get an electrician and just tell the electrician what you want and how to make what you want safer.
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Ground the surge protector to your rack, ground the rack to earth through the chassis of the equipment in said rack, which should be using 3 prong AC cables. Really depends a lot on your physical environment though. I’m not an electrician.
Well aT least everyone knows to actually ground a surge suppressor but I may actually make a video with some info dumping. In-between getting lectur3d by a Motorola engineer and learning about data center and radio grounding and learning about electrical residental code and grounding, I guess I need to be sharing info and hoping for the engineers to descend on to my comments.
Edit: also in grounded shielded cable becomes an interference antenna and unshielded cable isn’t really grounded or atleast not grounded as well as shielded
As far as upgrading grounding my house was built new in 2012, so it was already a above code, and I put the electric in for our entire property. we have 400amp service that goes to a meter box/Combo outside on a pedestal with 4x8 foot copper ground rods. The house gets 200amps 0-0-0-2 for wire and all the grounds in the house panel are isolated (since ground rods and first means of disconnect is outside not in the house panel)
TechShack I built a couple years ago and fed it 50amps of 240 from the pedestal with a Square home line panel. More power than I need but each bench, the network rack, my PC, the lighting, heat/AC have dedicated circuits and are balanced properly on both sides of the panel.
Then for EST ground, since not only have I been the lowly independent ITcontractor but I’ve also worked for two tier one manufacturers, I overkilled the EST gound by isane levels copying what they were using and their factories. Each workbench has a dedicated 8-ft ground rod, that runs with cable back in the building underneath the bench. Under the bench it goes to a distribution bar, that ties in an ESD grounded floor mat that I can use with grounded bootstraps, and if you prefer the tethered method, also tired to the distribution bar I have 10 gauge copper wire around the entire outside of the bench so you can jack on at any point. Each table/bench has an ESD work mat on top of the table, exact same size of the table, but it’s teathered on a quick disconnect because I don’t always want my surface electrically grounded or conductive depending on what I’m working on.
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There is a quite simple answer to this question: everything needs to be grounded to the same rods/grid. Otherwise you risk fatal a surge between two different groundings if lightning hits the earth somewhere near you.
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This is also very important for mains circuits, because you can actually have an AC voltage potential between soil in two different locations.
From what I remember, you can add multiple grounding rods to your electrical system, but you must attach them to a central point, and bond them to the service box from the electrical company.
For roof lightning arrestors they usually each have a grounding cable or strap running down the building to a dedicated rod. Lightning rods are electrically isolated from each other, so it isn’t an issue.
For anything else, you really need to worry about ground loops.
Think about any path that electrical current could flow, and if it forms a loop, you probably need to disconnect it from one side or the other.
Feel free to correct me if I’m wrong. I did a whole bunch of reading about grounding and noise reduction for antenna installations.
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I suppose it depends on what equipment you are using, but I would have imagined that everything is on the same common ground via connection to your house electrical system.
If you are using ungrounded outlets, I would recommend you stop doing that 
Electrical code doesn’t necessarily have a min ground rods just a min tested resistance. They are located and bonded with the neutrals at the first means of service disconnect. Typically when you install a new service if you run 2x8 foot rods 6 foot apart on a loop, you dont have to measure resistance for your inspector, since its assumed above the min. And in some of the rocky areas you can use grounding plates. After the first means of disconnect the ground wires have to be segregated from the neutrals on their own bus bar. Neutral bar cant be bonded to the housing of the panel. (this is newer code older houses wont). So yes, even if you have large property, if it only has one meter, by code you should only have one point of earth grounding and neutral bonding.
As far as my shop I mentioned ground rods there, but that is ONLY for the isolated ESD, its not bonded back to my electrical system. When I worked for Fijutsu FFNA all our production ESD had its own isolated ground, because of potential voltage coming through the ground because of neutral bonding. Revonate LLC and Seneca Data also did the same thing, so I copied it
Source: I Own JCMP Contracting Crop - a NYS Licensed Electrical contractor
I graduated high-school with my MCSE on Windows Server 2000, then went to work for seasonally an electrician long enough to get licensed. (he happens to be my high-school tech teacher)
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Not to be that guy but is this even a real thing? I assume this is the same as what you get running ethernet through a surge protector?
At best this is marketing magic: wouldn’t there be a bunch of interference on the line otherwise?
It is a real thing and not running the Ethernet cable thru a surge strip. The surge strip acts as a filter and will mess up your data rates / connection. Yes I had this happen to me when I had dsl and ran the phone line thru a surge strip and when I went from 1.5 meg down to 3 meg down the protection circuit said nope and caused connection issues.) What you do to ground everything is by running all the electronic power adapter / supply’s off of a surge strip at a minimum and go from there.
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A lot of modern breaker boxes come with surge protection built in these days, so it is becoming less of a thing in modern homes, because surge protection is done before the electricity even gets to the actual in-house wiring. But yeah having lived in a lot of different apartments with a lot of different wiring standards of the years, taking a lot of the same equipment with me until I managed to buy a house, I can promise you this definitely is a thing you should be at least thinking about.
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FYI- They do have surge breakers that you can retrofit into older houses that don’t have that functionality already built in.
They still recommend a surge protection at the point of use even with the whole house protection in the breaker box.
grounded outlets are sometimes ungrounded when a lawnmower wacks the bonding clamp on your ground rod. how often have you ever heard people talking about checking the their house ground, you more likley to hear people talk about what oil they put in thier car. lol
or a really crappy ground with high ohms cause it’s all corroded up in the soil.
it’s not snake oily when the house is full smoke and the back side of the breaker box is glowing red cause the grid just back fed a shit ton of lightening in to the house.
you can also retro fit with whole house SPD, which i plan to do.
re reading this, Amazon.com: Tupavco Ethernet Surge Protector (2 Pack) Gigabit High PoE++ Class 8 (154W/3.2A) TP302x2 : Electronics
dedicated protectors. might not be enough to cause issues. for example i’ve seen multigig put on older wire. i’ve seen 2.5g and 5g pull through older cat5e before. wish i had a link to that blog post, was in 2017 that i found that blog post.
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well my buddie’s area got F in the breaker box hole when the power company turned the power back on. wacked everything in the house. EXCEPT some ultra expensive appliance plugged in to one of those Eaton SpikeCubes i’ve been trying out. while not an Ethernet surge protector, a good ground is a good start and an outlet protector after that. seems the one item on a spikecube lived. no science to live but, an extra 2 cents.
I planned my ethernet system:
STP cables and sheilded ends
Grounded ubiquiti “Ethernet Surge Protection” boxes on any cable outdoors, The rack has a ground lug to the steel frame, the patch panels ground to the frame.
ALL UPS and others must have functioning ground.
Unifi PDP for machines in rack
If these are the older gen1 models then you might as well throw those away, they do nothing to protect you as they have a horribly flawed design with their PCB. It cant handle anything close to a surge current and so it melts instantly, cutting off the ground connection path so spikes just move right on to the equipment plugged in. I havent seen a gen2 model yet, but I hope the entire reason they made a gen2 was to fix the uselessness of gen1
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