I wasn’t home when the cable TV installer came to upgrade our service. What a mess. I’ve spent a week cleaning up the cable runs, cleaning up the wire bits he threw behind the furnace, etc. One thing I’ve noticed is that he didn’t ground the new fixtures, which consist of a powered signal amplifier and a couple of splitters. All have connections for a ground. My previous cable setup ran to one splitter, which was grounded to a cold water pipe. What do you think? Should I ground the fixtures? I’m inclined to, but I’m not whether he didn’t because of his obvious laziness, or because of some new school of thought that grounding the fixtures can interfere with the digital cable signal.
Many thanks, Neveragain
Replies
Generally you should ground it REAL WELL at the entry point to the structure, then nowhere else.
happy?
If the connectors were done right on the coaxial cable, the ground is the shield on the cable. Dan is right that the earth grounding should be done at the service entry. It should go through a lightning suppressor at that point.
Erich
Grounds, or the lack of them, can wreck havoc with a connected audio system due to ground loops. I believe code still states that the shield is to be grounded upon entry to the house. The voltage potential between the cable shield and the actual ground can easily be several volts.
Also, the cable amp may 'lift' the ground on the output side of the amp, so you may want to see if grounding this shield increases or decreases audio hum and visual artifacts.
I fought with this stuff for over a decade installing A/V systems, every install was different. Just one reason why most folks in the A/V business go satelite over cable.
Good luck.
Thanks, all. I'll try attaching the ground from the former system to the new setup at the entry point, and will see what happens to picture and sound quality.