5 ms·

> A quick check with a $10.00 outlet tester confirmed that there was a grounding issue. The tester confirmed that there was no ground. > send in an electrician

• colechristensen 4y ago
  And shouldn’t there be exactly one grounding point per building and definitely not one outlet randomly grounded to a pipe? Not an electrician but I’m pretty sure that’s a major code violation and safety hazard.
  • chrisseaton 4y ago
    > definitely not one outlet randomly grounded to a pipe? That's how it used to be done! Remember a lot of houses were built before electricity and it's been retrofitted over time.
    • doubled112 4y ago
      A water pipe is bare copper straight to the ground. It makes perfect sense if you think about it. Pretty sure that is how it is done in my much newer than electricity build.
      • loeg 4y ago
        Old copper water pipes, yes. Obviously you can’t ground using a PEX pipe.
        • cesarb 4y ago
          Wouldn't it also need a continuous copper pipe until it meets the ground? A pipe being made of copper or iron doesn't mean it's not connected to a plastic pipe or adapter upstream; and I've seen plumbers using a rubbery-looking tape between the threads when screwing two metal pipes together, which might not be conductive.
          • finnh 4y ago
            I just fixed this situation in a house from the 70s. Cable coax lines grounded to a metal hose bib ... which, in the crawl space, switches to PEX about a foot away from the bib. Cable guy installing high speed internet was all "nope!". I think the previous owners just had crap internet and didn't ever get into why.
            • sidewndr46 4y ago
              The coax shield must be broken somewhere between you and the service provider. "Grounding" a coax to PEX should never make a difference in any way.
              • finnh 4y ago
                I think part of his worry was lightning strike busting their equipment. Unsure about the rest.
          • loeg 4y ago
            > Wouldn't it also need a continuous copper pipe until it meets the ground? A pipe being made of copper or iron doesn't mean it's not connected to a plastic pipe or adapter upstream Right. > I've seen plumbers using a rubbery-looking tape between the threads when screwing two metal pipes together, which might not be conductive Probably PTFE (teflon) tape. The thing to do with oldschool copper pipes though was to braze them together, which is conductive.
        • rpvnwnkl 4y ago
          I think the continuous water still maintains a ground path even in pex
  • cwillu 4y ago
    Pipe is a great ground, if done properly. Nice big hunk of metal thoroughly embedded into the ground is all a ground plate is.
    • otikik 4y ago
      The problem with “if done properly” is that you actually have to go and check. If you just “hope that it is done properly” you can have a lot of surprises, like lights going out when the sink gets full of water. Or spicy dishwashers. If you don’t know whether it’s properly done, it’s much more efficient to throw a ground cable from the nearest service junction than it is to “hope” and then have to fix things later.
    • colechristensen 4y ago
      It’s not about whether or not pipe is a good ground. The electrical grounding for a building needs to be like a tree. No ground loops and exactly one grounding point. Arbitrarily adding grounds, especially through water pipes can do things like making all of the piping and water in the house hot if there is a fault somewhere and it definitely seems like that’s the case here. The whole idea is that the ground wire is the least resistance path for stray current to go to. When you have separate ground paths there can be a dangerous potential between ground wires and the least resistance path for stray current can again be you.
      • murderfs 4y ago
        There's a difference between the electrical return path (aka neutral) and protective earth (aka ground). Earth is purely for safety: you earth the metal chassis of appliances so that if for some reason they get shorted to hot, the current has a low impedance path to earth and your breaker will pop. It's perfectly acceptable to have an independent earth at every single outlet, as long as you're earthing to an acceptable source (which, AFAIK, means driving an earthing rod into the ground, because pipes aren't legal in the NEC anymore).
        • sidewndr46 4y ago
  • icehawk 4y ago
    You can have multiple ground points per building as long as the ground points are bonded to each other. You can only have a SINGLE tie between neutral and ground. What we don't know here is if the piping is tied to a grounding rod, or if there is a grounding rod or if the piping is the ground point.
• b112 4y ago
  Some old house, wired not understanding ac, mixed up the return and ground. Stuff works, but...
  • masklinn 4y ago
    Seems like a completely slapdash piece of work really: > They asked lots of questions, and then recommended that my air conditioner stay on a different outlet because there were two circuits. An AC has sufficient power draw that you'd normally put it on its own, exclusive, circuit. Like a drier or washing machine. Not on whatever random outlet is nearby.
    • Gracana 4y ago
      Probably talking about a window unit there.
      • bombcar 4y ago
        And even then if you've been anywhere with "fun" power you've noticed the lights dim when any beast of a machine turned on. The US grid has gotten better, and machines have too, but lights used to dim all the time.
• trebligdivad 4y ago
  I suspect both; I mean who worries about gzip when their touchpad is 'spicy'!
  • Lukas_Skywalker 4y ago
    MacBooks and iPads had the "spicy case" issue for quite a long time. In certain countries, the Apple power supply comes with two adapters for plugging it into the wall - one with two contacts, and one with three contacts. Only the one with three contacts is grounded. When using the ungrounded adapter, the entire case of my 2011 MacBook Air and the iPad 2 got slightly "spicy", although it felt more as if the case suddenly changed texture and was more wavy (probalby an artifact of europes 50Hz mains frequency). The strangest thing was turning on my touch controlled desk light while working on the laptop. If I touched the light and the laptop at the same time, the light shocked me quite noticeably.
    • BuildTheRobots 4y ago
      I've noticed "textured screen when charging" on a range of mobile devices which I've nearly always been able to correlate with cheap USB chargers. Other family members seem oblivious, though to me it's clear as night and day.
    • solarkraft 4y ago
      I thought one of the two wires should be equal to ground?
      • actionfromafar 4y ago
        That’s how it could be done in theory but it’s never because you would kill people. Instead one wire is neutral, one is phase, and the third, optional, is ground.
        • galangalalgol 4y ago
          Can you supply a good "this is how it actually works" reference for European electricity? In the US there is one neutral and one hot line. Then there is the ground that is grounded at the box preferably. You can sometimes have a 240 line split to feed two 120 outlets where the hot lines from each are at a 240 difference to each other. If one line has a large load relative to the other, the neutral won't be that close to ground. Is that was is happening with these laptops?
• KMnO4 4y ago
  This is not necessarily true depending on code. Some builds do not have grounded outlets as long as a GFCI is installed at the distribution. It’s weird and unnatural, but there’s nothing inherently wrong.
  • bastawhiz 4y ago
    Saying there's "nothing wrong" when there are obvious, serious hardware issues and a UPS that won't stop beeping is like saying "well there's no law that my tires can't be bald, so I'll keep driving because there's nothing wrong"
    • mannykannot 4y ago
      I do not think the situation is the same. I believe GFCI gives excellent protection against shock even if the ground is faulty and the neutral is floating with respect to earth. (Nevertheless, I still want my home to have properly grounded three-pin sockets, even if it is implausible that it will ever make a difference.) I hope an expert can chime in, but I suspect a 'spicy' trackpad would trigger GFCI.
      • SAI_Peregrinus 4y ago
        GFCI at the breaker should have the ground tied to neutral, and still have grounds on the outlets (tied back to the GFCI at the breaker). Current through the ground pins will trip the GFCI, rendering the system safe. Since the ground pin should be bonded to any exposed metal (e.g. aluminum laptop case) a fault leading to a "spicy touchpad" should instead shut off the entire circuit at the breaker. Just slapping a GFCI in without that bonding won't do anything though. The ground would be floating, and thus wouldn't ever trip the GFCI. There would be no path through the GFCI for the fault current to take, making the system just as dangerous as having an ungrounded conductive case. A "double insulated" system has non-conductive material for the case of the electrical device and only needs a two-pin polarized plug. A fault of live to case won't cause danger, because the case is an insulator. A fault of live to neutral will just blow the device's internal fuse (or trip the breaker if the device has no fuse, but the breaker is just to protect the romex wiring in the walls so the device could well be on fire by that time).
• nfriedly 4y ago
  I expect it's the landlord instructing the electrician to do a half-assed job to keep the cost down.
  • dehrmann 4y ago
    Except multiple visits are expensive, and no one wants the place to burn down.