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Small Cabin Forum / Off-Grid Living / (More) grounding questions
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offgrididaho
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# Posted: 9 Apr 2019 11:54 - Edited by: offgrididaho
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Hi All,

As I'm trying to finish up my solar power system am having some grounding questions that have me a little unsure, thought I'd get some input here. I've read through some threads here (particularly this: http://www.small-cabin.com/forum/3_7883_0.html) but still have questions.

Current setup is house all 120v wired, with a generator input into the main breaker panel in the house. My plan is to put all power equipment (batteries, inverters, charge controller etc) in shed and run power into the existing main breaker panel in the house to provide the 120v, charging will come from solar and generator.

Here's schematic of what I have right now:
Grounding schematic
(bigger image is here: http://www.pictureofnectar.com/outside/grounding.png)

* existing breaker panel in house has neutral and ground bonded on same bus bar and ground run to the water pipes for earth ground, I plan on leaving that as is.
* the generator is going to go (through an inlet) into a "main" style breaker box, but I'm going to add a bus bar to it and separate ground and neutral so they're NOT bonded
* the Victron charger/inverter is pretty straightforward with three AC wires (hot/neutral/grnd) in and three out, and then a case ground that will go to a ground rod outside the shed.
* panels on ground mount and combiner case will be grounded separately to their own ground rod (or can I ground to sched 40 pipe the mount is on?), since only pos/neg DC wires connect it to rest of system
* the Morningstar SureSine inverter is tricky... they have an "earth ground" terminal that they specify should go to earth ground, so I will have that wired to the ground rod (just case ground, right?). But there is not ground wire out on the AC side, just hot and neutral, and then they tell you to splice the neutral wire and also connect it to earth ground... to me that definitely seems like I'm bonding neutral and ground a second time, which I don't want to do.

My questions:
1) Does grounding the case of the Victron (or the "case ground" of the SureSine) to a ground rod mean I've created two points of grounding in the system?
2) Does the way Morningstar specifies the grounding of the neutral wire coming out of the inverter create a separate neutral to ground bond (sure seems like it does), and should I remove that from the setup?

Any other feedback on the layout appreciated (note: this layout is just to show my wiring/grounding, I am using lots of the recommend switches/bus bars/shut offs/fuses I just didn't include them here for simplicity sake).

Thanks in advance,

Bass

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