One of my students who is currently responsible for standing for inspection at their company encountered a inspector who made an interesting point about incompatible metals (i.e. copper and anodized aluminum).
The PV system in question used outdoor rated lay-in lugs to bond the rails to bare copper wire (so far so good). The ground wire was then zip-tied to the rail to carry it to the point where it entered a junction box along with the rest of the PV conductors. The inspector was concerned with the fact that the bare copper was in contact with the aluminum rails and that this might cause galvanic corrosion and subsequent failure of the grounding. I have never encountered this issue before and I wonder if anyone else has and what was the outcome. As an aside: I do know that 10 AWG and 12 AWG solid bare copper wire can be purchased "pre-tinned" (maybe not tin per se, but coated). We did so by mistake. We used it up, but not before one inspector questioned its use for the purpose of grounding our system. We showed him the UL label on the spool and scraped off the coating to expose the copper core and that satisfied him. To this day I don't know if the use of this wire for grounding was among its intended purposes. - Peter Peter T. Parrish, Ph.D., President California Solar Engineering, Inc. 820 Cynthia Ave., Los Angeles, CA 90065 CA Lic. 854779, NABCEP Cert. 031806-26 peter.parr...@calsolareng.com Ph 323-258-8883, Mobile 323-839-6108, Fax 323-258-8885 _______________________________________________ List sponsored by Home Power magazine List Address: RE-wrenches@lists.re-wrenches.org Options & settings: http://lists.re-wrenches.org/options.cgi/re-wrenches-re-wrenches.org List-Archive: http://lists.re-wrenches.org/pipermail/re-wrenches-re-wrenches.org List rules & etiquette: www.re-wrenches.org/etiquette.htm Check out participant bios: www.members.re-wrenches.org
