Haywire
Veteran Member
I'll just have to take your word for it. Seems to me like the ground is already shorted to the neutral at the main breaker panel.
220A welding circuit question
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crazyal
Super Member
Like I said, think of it like a circuit. You wouldn't connect the ground wire to the neutral wire on a simple duplex receptacle. The ground and neutral certainly aren't grounded inside the outlet. If you are wiring up a light fixture, you connect the ground wire to the ground screw or ground wire and not the neutral.
Yes it shouldn't make a difference. But remember the neutral wire's job is to provide a point between the two hot legs coming in from the pole.
My father had a problem with his house (built in 67). The main panel wasn't grounded, it just relied on the neutral coming in from the pole. Over the years he built a garage and added a sub panel (mid 70s). Dad knew plenty about electricity but not so much about codes. He did add a simple clamp on the water line coming in from the street for a ground.
Inside the meter box the connection for the neutral wires rusted, who pulls their meter to look inside it? So not knowing he had a problem he did nothing. The builder didn't do a good job balancing the load. So that one clamp he put on in the garage was now the only thing trying to keep the neutral from floating. Since he didn't use the correct equipment it started to fail. All of a sudden things with capacitors rated for voltages below 200 started blowing up. When he started to explore what was happening (later that day) he disconnected that one ground wire and the fridge turned on he got a nice shock and then blew out about a dozen electrical devices throught the house.
Yes it took several things to happen before a bare wire in his garage had live power on it. But because it does happen the code has been updated to include two ground rods for main panels, the gauge of ground wire needed, and that a sub panel's ground is no longer to be tied into the neutral.
My biggest problem with codes is that they should make a version of them easy to understand (at least for residential houses) since I can do work to my house's electrical system. A simple on-line system for homeowners with the logic behind it would go a long way.
Most people have no idea why the main feed coming into the house has two hot wires that are a larger gauge than the one single neutral wire. When i ask people most just say that the rest of the power goes through the ground rod.
Yes it shouldn't make a difference. But remember the neutral wire's job is to provide a point between the two hot legs coming in from the pole.
My father had a problem with his house (built in 67). The main panel wasn't grounded, it just relied on the neutral coming in from the pole. Over the years he built a garage and added a sub panel (mid 70s). Dad knew plenty about electricity but not so much about codes. He did add a simple clamp on the water line coming in from the street for a ground.
Inside the meter box the connection for the neutral wires rusted, who pulls their meter to look inside it? So not knowing he had a problem he did nothing. The builder didn't do a good job balancing the load. So that one clamp he put on in the garage was now the only thing trying to keep the neutral from floating. Since he didn't use the correct equipment it started to fail. All of a sudden things with capacitors rated for voltages below 200 started blowing up. When he started to explore what was happening (later that day) he disconnected that one ground wire and the fridge turned on he got a nice shock and then blew out about a dozen electrical devices throught the house.
Yes it took several things to happen before a bare wire in his garage had live power on it. But because it does happen the code has been updated to include two ground rods for main panels, the gauge of ground wire needed, and that a sub panel's ground is no longer to be tied into the neutral.
My biggest problem with codes is that they should make a version of them easy to understand (at least for residential houses) since I can do work to my house's electrical system. A simple on-line system for homeowners with the logic behind it would go a long way.
Most people have no idea why the main feed coming into the house has two hot wires that are a larger gauge than the one single neutral wire. When i ask people most just say that the rest of the power goes through the ground rod.
Haywire
Veteran Member
Well... my barn isn't to code then. The panel in it is a 100a panel designed to be a main with the neutral and ground bars bussed together (I replaced the 100a main breaker with a 60a). One bar has the neutral feed from the main panel in the house and the other bar has a solid wire to the ground rod at the barn. The grounds and neutrals are not segregated.
oh well,
Ian
oh well,
Ian
dstig1
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Ahhhhhh! You were looking for an excuse, Ian!
It isn't hard to separate them. Most panels have a single screw or strap that you remove to separate the neutral from the ground. If you needed to cobble something, you could simply take a piece of plastic larger than the neutral buss, remove the buss and screw the plastic in place as an insulator. Then screw the neutral buss to the plastic, avoiding metal contact.Al - if they wanted the NEC to make sense they would have never used the terms "grounding conductor" and "Grounded conductor" to mean two different things...for one example.
Haywire said:
Yes it is, but at that point any current can flow a short distance to the rods in the earth. It isn't going to energized all your enclosures, boxes, water pipes, etc. If they are connected anywhere downstream then everything in the system that's grounded could see current on a regular basis. Don't want to plug in your good old metal cased drill motor and get a shock from holding it.
Functionally everything will work, as the electrons don't care which way they get back to the source. But for safety, keep them properly separated.
Haywire
Veteran Member
So since the sub panel in question is also ground rodded, it's a non-issue. LOL
LOLHaywire, if you have a main panel and a sub panel connected with a ground lead and both panels have ground rods, you have built yourself a battery. the circulating current over time will rot out many things in the system, to say nothing of your TV, PC, sound system going nuts.
