At work, I recently put in a ground system for our new antenna system, which requires a good ground system. A critical part of that is properly bonding the copper ground wires to the ground rod. The best way to do that is exothermic welding.
A lot of people call it CADweld, which is a registered trademark of Erico, which is one source. However their less expensive One Shot has been difficult to acquire. In searching the internet, I found a different company that makes the same thing. They call it a Uni-Shot, made by Harger and can be found at tessco.com.
Using this method of bonding ground wires to your ground rods, prevents corrosion, and high resistance connections to your ground rods. If you use a clamp, or other compression method to bond your ground system, it will require cleaning the connections regularly, and still won’t insure a good ground connection.
In this blog post, I will show you how to use a CADweld uni-shot to exothermically weld your ground rods. The photo below shows all of the components of the CADweld uni-shot.
Cadweld Exothermic Weld Components
From left to right, you have the following items:
- Uni-shot mold
- Ceramic Disk
- Metal Disk
- Starting powder
- Ceramic Lid
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