Portable Earthing & Grounding Equipment — IEC 61230 Manufacturer

What a portable earthing set is sized from

Before work starts on a de-energised circuit, the conductor has to be connected to earth at the worksite and short-circuited between phases. That is what IEC 61230 covers: portable equipment for earthing, or earthing and short-circuiting, of isolated or de-energised installations and networks — overhead or underground, a.c. or d.c., at low or high voltage.

The standard is explicit about what the equipment is rated by, and it is worth reading before the enquiry is written. Performance is based on the electro-dynamic and electro-thermal effects acting during a short-circuit, and the withstand capability is expressed as rated values of current, time and peak factor. IEC 61230 gives no rated voltage: the installation voltage enters through the insulating component and the geometrical dimensions of the equipment.

So a set is quoted from the prospective fault current at the point of work, the clearing time of the upstream protection and the conductor size — not from the system voltage alone. A set that is the wrong cross-section for the fault level will pass a visual check and still fail at the moment it is called upon.

The current-carrying medium is part of the standard too: the equipment it covers uses copper cables, copper bars or aluminium bars, and the flexible cables for it are specified separately under IEC 61138. The second edition, published in 2008, extended the use of aluminium to all conductive parts and brought d.c. installations into scope.

The routine failure mode is a fitting that does not match

The most common problem is not a defective set but a mismatched one: clamps that do not fit the conductor geometry actually present at that substation, or terminations that do not match the existing earthing points.

Both are invisible until the set is used. Send us the conductor type, the fault level and the clamp arrangement in use, and the set is quoted against the point of work rather than against a catalogue page.

• Portable earthing and short-circuiting sets to IEC 61230
• Systems from 10 kV to 110 kV and 110 kV / 220 kV
• 27.5 kV railway catenary grounding sets
• Earth rods, grounding conductors, cable lugs and clamps
• Composite-insulated zinc oxide surge arresters

Insulating operating rods and the tools around the set

Applying and removing a grounding set is itself live-work-adjacent activity, so the operating rods, discharge rods and detector used alongside it belong to the same specification discussion as the set.

Because the set is only one part of the arrangement, we quote the whole worksite package — set, rods, clamps and connectors — so the parts cannot turn out to be mutually incompatible on site.

Why the fits matter more than the headline rating

A set is a system of copper, insulation and mechanical fittings. The rating on the label describes the current it can carry; the quality of the work is whether the assembly still fits the conductor, the structure and the earthing point after years of site use.

We manufacture the conductor, the insulation and the fittings, which is why a non-standard clamp arrangement or a specific length is a drawing question rather than a sourcing problem.