Clarke Electric Cooperative Inc. (Osceola, Iowa, U.S.) was having trouble with some pre-cast concrete pads it was using to support a single-phase pad-mount transformer and a meter cabinet. The concrete pads were not staying level over time.

Crews sometimes found a pad-mounted transformer leaning one way and the associated meter cabinet leaning the other. On occasion, crews even discovered weeds growing between the transformer and meter. Because the utility's practice was to trench cables underground from the transformer to the meter, there was no room in the pre-cast concrete pad to loop extra cable. If an elbow failure occurred, there was no extra slack to place a new elbow on the cable. Clarke Electric Cooperative needed another way of installing a pad-mount transformer and meter cabinet.

The utility contacted engineers at Nordic Fiberglass Inc. (Warren, Minnesota, U.S.; www.nordicfiberglass.com) in search of a solution. The Nordic engineers designed the GS-37-52-15-TMS-MG fiberglass ground sleeve. The Nordic sleeve alleviated the problem of tilted installations by placing a large fiberglass flange at the bottom of the ground sleeve to serve as a footing. This flange, or footing, gives greater stability in a variety of soil conditions. With this one-piece ground-sleeve design, the utility was able to install the transformer and the meter cabinet on the same top surface. The gap was eliminated and so was the weed problem. In addition, the ground-sleeve cavity provided space for cable training.