Ground Fault Detection Boards
A drilling rig runs its power system deliberately loose to earth, so that the first fault to ground is information rather than an outage. The board that turns that decision into something a crew can act on is the ground fault detection board. ETSCO supplies replacement ground fault boards for (Ross Hill, Hill Hayes, Hill Graham, & IPS) style SCR houses.
These are protection boards, not regulating boards. Nothing on them sets a speed or trims a voltage. They watch insulation between the live system & the steel everybody is standing on, on the generator side & on the (DC) bus, & they report what they find to a meter & a lamp on the front of the cubicle.
(Ross Hill, Hill Hayes, Hill Graham, & IPS) style
Earth leakage & insulation monitoring — annunciation only
AC 0—100% & DC 100—0—100% percentage meters
What the ground fault board watches, & how it reports
The circuit is deliberately undramatic. Indicator lamps sit dim in the healthy state rather than dark, so a burned bulb cannot pass for a healthy system. Let one leg of the generator output find earth, directly or through something damp, & the corresponding lamp brightens while a percentage meter swings to show how far the insulation has fallen. The same arrangement watches the (DC) side, where a centre-zero meter reads 100—0—100% so the reading tells the crew which polarity has gone down, positive or negative, not merely that something has.
Around the board sit the parts that make it usable: the percentage meters, the lamps, a reset & test switch so the loop can be proved rather than assumed, & the sensing resistors & fuses. A board that reads full scale with the bus cold, a lamp that will not come back after reset, or a channel that ignores a deliberate test are all reasons to pull the board rather than chase the cable. Worth saying plainly: this board annunciates, it does not clear the fault. Finding the faulted feeder is still the crew's work.
Ordering replacement ground fault boards
ETSCO supports
- Ground fault detection & ground testing boards
- Panel mounted & plug-in board arrangements
- (AC) & (DC) ground percentage meters
- Indicator lamps, lenses, bulbs, & reset switches
- Sensing resistors & fuses used around the board
Contact ETSCO to confirm current support for your ground detection arrangement.
Send with your RFQ
- The legend & revision screened on the laminate
- Whether the board is panel mounted or plugs into a rack
- The line-up generation & model this board came out of
- The meters & lamps currently fitted, with their scales
- What the circuit does now: reads full scale cold, will not reset, or ignores test
- Views of the board faces, the meters, & the lamp panel
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