Electrical Power & Protection


Stakeless earth ground loop testing

April 2019 Electrical Power & Protection

Testing the grounding components of equipment in hard to reach spaces, including areas that are indoors or fully paved and do not permit driving auxiliary test stakes, is always challenging. Comtest is offering the Fluke 1630-2 FC Stakeless Earth Ground Clamp, a high quality, heavy duty clamp jaw that stays in alignment and in calibration even in industrial environments. It can also identify ground loop resistance without the need to disconnect then reconnect the earth electrode from the system.

Stakeless measurement

The 1630-2 FC clamp measures earth ground loop resistances for multi-grounded systems using the dual clamp jaw. This test technique eliminates the dangerous and time-consuming activity of disconnecting parallel grounds, as well as the process of finding suitable locations for auxiliary test stakes. Users can also perform ground tests in places that were previously difficult: inside buildings, on power pylons or anywhere there is no access to soil to place auxiliary test stakes.

Fluke Connect wireless system

The 1630-2 FC supports the Fluke Connect Wireless System. Fluke Connect wirelessly connects the clamp to an app on a smartphone or tablet. The app shows the ground resistance measurements on the smartphone or tablet display. These measurements, as well as the GPS location from the phone, and the images, can be saved to Fluke Connect Cloud storage and shared with the project team.

The Fluke 1630-2 FC has the following features:

• Earth ground AC leakage current measurement: It identifies AC leakage currents without disconnecting the earth ground stake from the grounding system – this is ideal for system troubleshooting.

• Rugged: The heavy duty clamp jaw stays in alignment and in calibration even in every day, on the job industrial environments.

• Logging measurements: The earth ground clamp saves time by automatically recording data at preset intervals and saves up to

32 760 measurements in memory at the set logging interval. It saves time by recording and storing measured values.

• Alarm threshold: It has user-defined high and low alarm limits for rapid measurement evaluation.

• Band-pass filter: The selectable band-pass filter function removes unwanted noise from the AC leakage current measurement.

For more information contact Comtest, +27 10 595 1821, sales@comtest.co.za, www.comtest.co.za



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