6/28/2023 0 Comments Grounded outletLightning strikes also get filed under “it happens.” According to NOAA, there are 25,000,000 cloud-to-ground lightning strikes every year. Electrical motors go bad, wires break, etc. G rounding is in place to protect us from faults (bad things within an electrical circuit) and damage from lightning strikes. Faults just happen. ![]() Everyone around here (and I would imagine many other places) just calls it a ground, so we’ll stick with that. There are system grounds (power company side of things), and equipment grounds (your house side of things). In fact, the “ground” we are talking about is technically known as an equipment ground. It’s a safety measure put in place for you, your house, and your stuff that is plugged into/connected to your house. Having a fully grounded electrical system is all about safety. The grounded cords typically show up on items that have a metal case or have sensitive electronics inside them. Things like refrigerators, washing machines, computers, and TVs have grounded cords. However, there are lots of other items in your home that do utilize the ground as a safety measure. Lamps, cell phone chargers, and toasters only have two prongs on their cords. In fact, there are lots of things you plug into your electrical system that doesn’t use the 3rd pin at all. The fault must be found and “cleared” before things can return to normal, and you can turn the power back on.Īs you can see from the above example, a ground wire is not needed for a 120v circuit to function. When a breaker trips it is known as a fault. (This is why it’s important that your breakers be sized correctly for the wire it’s protecting.) If the breaker sees an abnormal amount of current flowing through it, it trips and shuts down the power. The breaker is in place to trip (kill the power) if it senses the current flow is too high in the circuit. The hot wire is connected to the electric panel via a circuit breaker (or fuse, if your system is really old). Notice I did not bring up the use of a ground wire at all… ![]() The electrons flow from the hot side of an outlet, through the device that is plugged into it (toaster/vacuum/hairdryer/etc), and back through the neutral wire to the panel (or the source.) The device you plug into the outlet completes the circuit between the hot and the neutral wires, and electricity flows through the device to run a motor, heat some coils, or whatever is needed. The most important thing to remember is that electricity flows in a circuit, and it’s always trying to get back to the source. UNGROUNDED ELECTRICAL OUTLETS CAN BE A HAZARDįirst, let’s briefly run through how electricity in your home works more specifically, how the outlets work when something is plugged into them. Here is an outlet that is a modern 3-hole, but it testing ungrounded. I’m plugged into a 3-hole outlet in a 90 yr old house, but the ground icon (center light) is not lit up. You can see an example of this in the picture below. My receptacle tester that I use during home inspections is way more sophisticated as a circuit analyzer, but in this case essentially reports the same info: is there a ground present at the outlet. If you are unsure if your receptacles are grounded, you can pick up a cheap outlet tester and it will tell you if you have a ground connected at the outlet. Of course, this doesn’t make things “grounded,” you simply lose the frustration of having to use one of those cheater adapters that have the ground pin missing. However, I see lots of older houses where folks will replace their outlets with new (modern, 3-hole) outlets to make it easier to plug grounded cords in. If you only see two vertical slots, they are ungrounded. Most of the time, you can simply look at your outlets and see if you still have the old ungrounded style or not. ![]() HOW TO TELL IF YOU HAVE UNGROUNDED OUTLETS I get a lot of deer-in-headlights looks when I start to talk about this stuff at my home inspections, so let me break things down for you here, and explain what all this means. This could be true even if you have modern 3-hole outlets installed. ![]() So if you live in an older home, that hasn’t been upgraded to modern electrical safety standards, chances are your system is ungrounded too – or at least part of it is. The grounding conductor wasn’t introduced until ~1962 in Louisville, KY. These are older homes with receptacles (or outlets, as everyone in my neck of the woods calls them) that only have two slots, and are missing the ‘3rd hole.’ That hole is for the ground conductor of the circuit. At least once a week I inspect a house that has an ungrounded electrical system.
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