I have replaced every bit of coax from where it comes in to my house and both split locations. I am still getting tickled when making connections to a splitter, one splitter is brand new out of the box. any suggestions on how to find out where the current is comming in? my system is grounded at the source and after the first splitter.

 

Is it cable or coax coming from your LNB on the satellite? If it is from your satellite, it does have voltage, but not enough to make you "tingle". Touch your tongue to it or a frozen flagpole and you can tell for sure.

 

How is the coax grounded? It should be grounded with the house ground. If not, there could be a voltage difference between the coax ground and the devices it is connected to.

 

why two grounds ?

I would remove the second one , and see what happens

 

Some in the neighborhood had a groundfault (I dont know hwo)
so I put in an coax galvanic insulator, and then my cabel is out of voltage from other sources.

Later I have read, some flat screen TVs may give this error if the TV is connected to an outlet without ground.

dsk

 

Is your grounding hooked up to your power ground at the meter? I have found voltage on cable from a bad ground because of elect. water heater with a broken element. You could be getting voltage back from a TV set. Try disconnecting your tv sets and see if the voltage go away. If so, then hook one tv set at a time and see if it comes back. TV set can send back as much as 110 volt. Your ground would bleed most if it off.

 

Is the voltage on the cable side or the house side of the connection? Could be a problem with the cable companies amplifier equipment.

 

I have only 3 devices hooked up to the cable at this point
Plasma TV
Regular TV
Modem

The cable running into the Plasma and the Modem run through individual surge protectors. I will double check that the surge protectors are plugged into properly grounded outlets when I go home for lunch today. If one of the outlets is not properly grounded, would that explain my dilemma?


The sedond ground was installed because the voltage was noticeable with only one ground

 

AC or DC? What amplitude? Did you measure the voltage? Are you feeling it on the shield or the center conductor? Is the voltage present when the cable is disconnected at the entry point?

I wouldn't lick the cable until you figure out what you have. A tingle on a dry finger might be something else on a wet tongue.

 

The only question I can answer is that I am feeling it on the connector. I will grab my multimeter and test tonight. I will also disconnect from the source and see what happens.

 

try disconnecting both grounds

 

All grounds in the house need to be tied together with the house ground electrodes. Phone and cable should not be driving their own ground rods.

 

Maybe I'm not being completely clear. The cable splitter has a jumper with a grounding wire connected to the water pipe. They did not drive their own rod.

 

OK, I think I've narrowed the problem down. I checked the surge protector that the plasma tv is hooked up to with an outlet tester. It came back correct. Then I checked the plug that it plugs into. Also correct. I checked the protector that the computer and modem are plugged into and the outlet the powers it. Both came back correct. After I took the cable feed off of that surge protector, the outlet and the protector showed an open ground.

I get wiring, but electrical theory is something I'm still learning, but here'es what I think is happening and someone can correct me if I am wrong. The plasma tv is kicking back voltage into the cable. Because the outlet my surge protector is plugged into is ungrounded, (and the cable is) the electricity is grounding out through the coax.

What I need to do to fix this is properly ground that outlet, correct? I have plans to tackle that this weekend anyway, but once the ground is established in the outlet, there should be no electricity feeding back through the cable, correct?

 

You have an open ground on the circuit the stuff is plugged into. However a ground wire is not supposed be a current carrier, so you still have another problem of some defective device putting voltage onto the ground.

 

If your tv set is putting the voltage onto the cable, than it not your wiring. You could have a bad power supply inside the tv set. New tv use the chassie for ground . The F-81 on the back of the tv is set into the chassie and that is where the voltage will leak onto the cable because it is ground to earth somewhere(ground block or strand).