I am in Indonesia and the local electricity company is bad and there is no actual electrician around. People just connect wires together.
So with this in mind I recently ripped out my wires (unearthed) and put in new earthed ones:
- I have a digital meter, ungrounded.
- This connects via 50m long NYY 2x2.5mm cable to my consumer unit (self-installed)
- I have a ground rod which I buried recently in the ground, connected to my consumer unit.
- I have a plug-in receptacle tester which shows 11V neutral -> earth
- The correct voltage for Indonesia is 220V, but I have 240V-250V (a few years ago it was about 195V, because there was about 50kVA connected across neighbouring properties to a 20kVA transformer, so I got them to install a new one after some lobbying, and I believe there is a knob on it which they turned up too high).
So I have a fault but I am not exactly sure where.
The earth rod has not been tested using any tool, but it's rainy season and the ground is extremely wet right as I speak, so it doesn't seem like there would be a problem here.
Can anyone suggest how to resolve?
Edit: I just tested one circuit (which uses 2.5mm wiring), and plugged in a 1800W kettle. With the kettle OFF 251V L->N, and 11V N->E. With the kettle ON 237V and 8V respectively.
Edit2: I found some info on Youtube which seemed fairly credible, and checked my own meter. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ImdN08dHiYQ
This is the diagram on YT
You can see there are five terminals.
Here is my meter:
The labels are not clear in my photo but they are printed on the connector: 1 (phase in), 2 (phase out), ⏚, 3 (neutral in), 4 (neutral out). So the bottom ⏚ screw is supposed to be connected to a ground rod, but there was never one installed, and then the top ⏚ is supposed to bond to the top screw of neutral in.
Now, according to the video if the ground had been bonded at the meter (which is impossible as no ground exists there), then if I additionally bond at the consumer unit, this would cause the tamper detection on the meter to trip and it would stop working.
In this case where there is no connection between ground and earth at the meter, then the video suggests that if we instead bond at the consumer unit, then if the neighbour has a current leakage then that can make its way to ground at our consumer unit, and be read by our meter. For this reason it is recommended to ground at the meter.
So it seems like I have three possible solutions:
- connect the ground and neutral in my consumer unit with the possible cost of paying for the neighbour's leakage
- install a ground rod at the meter (because it is 50 metres away then this seems more practical than grounding it to the existing ground rod at the house) and then ask the electricity company to open up the meter and ground it for me
- have the electricity company move the meter nearer the house and connect to my ground rod. This is probably better than option 2, but likely to be troublesome and time consuming, so I will go for option 1 for now.