Stray voltage

[fishandshroom]

I am a hvac guy. (had to say this to prevent getting hollered at for working on furnace) I was doing some work on my in laws furnace and I got a shock each time I touched the black iron gas line after further investigation I realized everything had a little current flowing. I disconnected the gas line and shut off the power to the house and there was still low voltage everywhere. I called the sparky who wired the place and he came out the next morning and ended up calling the REA. They ended up finding 2-5 volts everywhere on the place (dairy farm) They are still working on figuring out what is going on. Scary and weird. Anybody know of other stories like this.

[Dave S]

I did a quick web search to find that stray voltage on dairy farms is not all that uncommon.

[fishandshroom]

I searched it too This is what makes it kinda scary. They were getting voltage from the cows drinking cups not very good for the milk production.

[JohnMickish]

I've heard of this and it's not good for dairy farms. I would say that something is not properly grounded, did anyone steal the ground cable off of the REAs pole this summer?

[Tom7227]

I used to do utility regulatory work and there were always stories about dairy farms somehow getting voltage from transmission lines. I don't know if this is accurate or not. Is there a transmission line in the area? I'm pretty sure NSP has been sued over this.

A few years ago the cable TV guy came out and found out that there was juice in that line. The power line was touching a tree in the yard and so was the TV cable and it was picking up juice through the tree trunk. I was there and I can confirm that one.

[fastkaw]

I ran into this one time. (on the farm) Many years ago they used to fuse the

neutral. Dumb thing to do now days, but thats the way they did it.

You might want to look in any of the out building for a fused neutral

with a blown fuse.

DISCLAIMER: i am in no way an expert, at anyting. anything i say is my own opinion and/or observation, and should never be regarded as fact, unless otherwise stated.

[papabear]

acctualy got a plumbing call at a dairy farm once about a leaking water heater, during a barn fire power ran through pipes in barn and blew out all the seals in the heater ing the house

[Fishinguy40]

Years ago (probably mid-90's) there was an in depth piece on 60 Minutes done about this. Consumers Power, the utility in Michigan, was sued because of stray voltage. I believe the major cause is improper or lack of grounding on the utilities distribution system.

[Whoaru99]

I'd go with improper/faulty bonding/connection of the neutral and ground circuits. These are the first things I'd have checked...all the neutral and grounding connections.

That said, I'd think 2-5 volts differential shouldn't give you a shock. Not saying it's good/OK, but must have been something else (or more) to get a shock, IMO.

It's not unusual to have some voltage differential between the neutral/grounded wire and the equipment grounding wires due to voltage drop in the current carrying neutral/grounded wire vs the non-current carrying grounding wire. The greater the load or longer the wires, the greater the voltage drop and differential.

Normally this difference is small, but if there is a bad connection in the neutral circuit this would increase the voltage drop at any given load, thus higher voltage differential to ground.