@ Joe and mramos:

When I first encountered the "ac" reading on the digital meter I asked my Dad about it.  He gave me a great suggestion.  He said to take a AA battery and take readings on it, so I did.  1.5 vdc and 2.4 ac!  I am not saying we don't have a pulsed dc or an ac component on our earth batteries but this told me that what I have read about digital meters seems to be correct.  Try it for yourselves and see if I am correct.  I think I tried this with my analog meter but to be honest, I don't recall the results.  I will test it again and report back.  Hope this helps.  PS This assumes that there should be no ac reading on an AA battery which I believe is correct.

Bill

@mramos

I use to have a fluke to play with at my old job.... there network testers are also awesome.  Anyways freezers setup had isolation through flower pots and that seemed to allow for a greater voltage effect otherwise there was a short undergound.  But he has to have more than 3ma of current .. look at that blue led kinda bright.  Once my weather clears up a few months or so i will be able to go finish my own initial tests to confirm things.  Also as we have learned in other threads electrical isolation in respect to ground can be achieved through using relative grounds and separating the circuits .  Look at the single wire exp thread and take for instance the ground as a conductor for this example.
  We could have a battery wired in series with just two ground terminals one of the ground terminals the copper positive one connects directly to load  the zinc spike say 10 feet away is connected to the batteries positive and the - on the battery is connected to the load. After my initial tests i determined that the ground could work as a leg of a circuit in that sense. Not very well  but i repeated the same test with a complete second set of the first experiment approx 10 feet away from the first setup and got the same results still on both. So  assuming they operated independently from each other, as long as each set of zinc and copper had a relative ground the distance between them and there placement shouldn't matter.  Im guessing that a polarized cap might do the trick for each set and then some how  discharge them in series into a transformer.  The quicker the better so small caps would need to be used.  Those are my latest thoughts.
                                                                                                                                                       Joe

@ All
This was easy enough to check, don't understand why but I get readings both ways.
Sorry about the size I'll figure it out sooner or later.
Sid

only one loaded last time

@ sid10:

Great job!!  That is exactly what I observed.  I just checked again tonight with my analog meter and got the same results. (On a D cell bat.)  This is why it is so confusing to me.  Does this mean the meters are wrong?  Or, does it mean there is an AC component on DC?  I read what mramos said and he has better equipment, scopes, many meters, etc. to check with.  I am glad I am not the only one seeing these results.  Thanks for posting this.  Nice pictures by the way.

Bill