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Do self grounding 110V receptacles really work?

12K views 50 replies 9 participants last post by  WillK 
#1 ·
People,

I have a bedroom with 4 plugs in the walls, they are 100v receptacles, and I pulled one to see, and all 3 wires are connected. But, when I plug inthe grounding "check" tool, the light shows up as not grounded.

I thern looked in the panel, and it was one from about 1969 or so. has brealers, and I se that breaker that serves that bedroom. It of course has a blk wire to it, and tried to follow the white and bare wire back, but man, iyt becomes like spaghetti.

Dont want to mess with that pasta, so I heard of these SELF grounding 100v plugs one can but online. Good idea? Do they work? Are they easy to simply wire up?

Thanks.
 
#2 ·
Yes, self-grounding receptacles work, but only with metal boxes, and only if the box is grounded. You say that your circuit in question has a ground wire both at the breaker panel and at the outlet box. The problem would be that somewhere that ground wire is either disconnected or broken. Could be at the breaker panel, some outlet(s) {receptacles, switches, etc} before the receptacle you're working on, or somewhere in between.
 
#3 ·
Big thanks, SD. Geez, guess this is a bigger problem than I thought. I have plastic boxes. Doesnt this kind of defeat the point of getting self grounding receptacles?? I mean, if the metel box has to be grounded, then whats the point? If that was the case, wouldnt the receptacle i the plastic box be grounded as well? Maybe Im missing something here.

Thanks, Man.
 
#4 ·
Since plastic is an insulator or non-conductive you cannot use the self-grounding devices.

With metal boxes the self-grounding feature just means you do not need to connect the grounding conductor to the device. The metal to metal contact serves that purpose.
 
#6 ·
Just thought, I would be comfortable to try this: switch main breaker OFF, then tighten all the bare grounds and neutrals along the to - those set screws. Isnt this worth a try?

Tanks again.
 
#9 ·
BTW: if you go messing in the panel, PLEASE be sure you know what you're doing. Even with the main breaker OFF, 240 volts remain in that panel.

Maybe you could remove the cover of the panel, and take a pic of it, and post it here? While you're at it, take a pic of the receptacle.
 
#10 ·
Sirs, thats the best advice Ive seen in a long time- Juice is STILL in the panel even though main is off. Fortunately, it did occur to me as I looked, not touched, at it. Whew. (even though your warning is well conceived, I did figure this out before this post). And thats the reason I aint messing with this anymo.

I believe you and other posters here are right in that the break has to be somewhere else in between. Thing is, does that mean tear up the walls? Im thinking someone used a sawzall maybe years ago, but they would have had to cut just the ground wire and miss the other 2 by say, 1 mm or so.......
 
#12 ·
most failures of electrical cables and systems for that matter happen at the splice points(required to be in boxes) so a quick look in to all switch/plug boxes on that circuit should find the problem. If and I say IF it should be in a portion of cable behind the drywall it is possible to locate the break, closely before opening the walls.
 
#14 ·
you will have to determine which receptacles in the house are on that circuit. There may be multiple rooms on one circuit. Check all the outlets on that circuit. Since you have a meter, cut off the breaker, and go around and check receptacles for voltage. If there is none, open the recept. (carefully, even though the breaker is off, sometimes we check for voltage, and there is none only because we didn't have a good connection with the meter). Make sure the grounds are connected in all the recepts.

You said that you had a receptical tester to find open grounds. Did you use this on all the recptacles? What were the results?
 
#15 ·
sorry for delay, sirs. Yes, I checked all 4 plugs in the room with the tester, and alll 4 are with NO ground. I believe these are on 1 circuit. If theyre on 1 circuit, dont they all have to be connected with the same ground circuit too?

Thanks!
 
#17 ·
You sure did. You created a code violation and still did not ground the receptacles. What a waste of time, materials and effort. This will also probably need to still be fixed when you sell the house if the home inspector catches it.

Ground rods do not provide a ground for receptacles. They are for events like lightning.
 
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#19 ·
Thanks, people. I know its a short cut. still, isnt it better than it was? Before yous imply I ignored/wasted your time here, all the tips here, as you say, were considered by myself, and I did persue them. You behave as if I ignored them- not true. As evident by how many days I took to follow them through, and make trips to that house miles away (there is no internet there). I follwed every tip and came up empty.

Ground tester checkd out all OK. Not sure if that tester is always true or not- I didnt invent it. BTW, yes, Im not an elec, but I was told by a local elec (just yesterday, as I met him in the neighborhood) that these houses around these parts have similar fixes, and even the city code people are aware of it- its just that they cant chase all them down to the end. This is not an area with all code housing, unfortunately.

The alternative was to hire a guy- sure, tear up the box maybe, pull permits, etc etc etc. This is a 100 year old house, and this work I did probably is the better of the elec "fixes", if you really want to know. Im not ready to tear the house down.

Still I appreciate very much your effort, and all in good faith. Just sometimes, you try to do the best under the circumstance.
 
#20 ·
Thanks, people. I know its a short cut. still, isnt it better than it was? Before yous imply I ignored/wasted your time here, all the tips here, as you say, were considered by myself, and I did persue them. You behave as if I ignored them- not true. As evident by how many days I took to follow them through, and make trips to that house miles away (there is no internet there). I follwed every tip and came up empty.

Ground tester checkd out all OK. Not sure if that tester is always true or not- I didnt invent it. BTW, yes, Im not an elec, but I was told by a local elec (just yesterday, as I met him in the neighborhood) that these houses around these parts have similar fixes, and even the city code people are aware of it- its just that they cant chase all them down to the end. This is not an area with all code housing, unfortunately.

The alternative was to hire a guy- sure, tear up the box maybe, pull permits, etc etc etc. This is a 100 year old house, and this work I did probably is the better of the elec "fixes", if you really want to know. Im not ready to tear the house down.

Still I appreciate very much your effort, and all in good faith. Just sometimes, you try to do the best under the circumstance.
Noquacks,

Sending a wire from a receptacle to a ground rod does not ground the circuit, and it isn't any better than what you had before. In case of a short, the earth will not clear it. It would have been just as simple to put a GFCI receptacle on the circuit and mark it "no equipment ground".

The first thing you should do is to undo what you've done, then let us help you some more.

I aologize for the harsh words, but we want you to be safe, OK?
 
#21 · (Edited)
Where is the new ground rod? Outside?
You can take the new ground wire off the ground rod and run it along the siding, then through at a convenient point into the basement, and over to the panel and connect it to the panel ground bus. If you reached the existing fat ground wire between the panel and the entering cold water pipe then you can clamp the new 12 gauge ground wire there instead of going all the way to the panel.
 
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#24 ·
I've always heard it said that running a separate ground wire back to the panel is illegal, so I'm not sure what Allan is thinking (he's definitley more experienced than I am). Perhaps he's thinking that the original run is single THHN instead of Romex.

At any rate, I think I'll leave the rest of this stuff to Speedy, Allan, et. al. Good luck, I'll be following for my own edification :)
 
#25 ·
Allen's suggestion is a better fix then a ground rod:huh:. Proper solution is to do it right. Figure out where the break is and learn how to do sheetrock repair and painting to boot! It will be fun to learn how to fix the problem correctly and not just wing it.

The tester is reading as if there is a ground there. Which is true. It's just a horrible dangerous ground that gives you a false sense of security.

What you want to do is bond the receptacle all the way back to the panel. In other words the ground wire (bonding wire really...) is connected to the ground wire (bonding wire really...) that is at the service. This provides a very low resistance path (the earth has a high resistance in this instance) back to where the electricity wants to go more than anything in the world which is the transformer outside your house where that ground wire was born, as it were.
 
#26 · (Edited)
It is within code to run a grounding conductor to the panel vaguely following the route of the power conductors, including on the wall surface. This permits the grounding of previously ungrounded receptacles without having to tear open the walls.

In the case of a home on a slab, the ground wire can still be run along the exterior wall on the way to the panel.

Adding a neutral, such as if trying to extend power from a switch with just raw hot and switched hot wires, cannot be done this way; neutrals (grounded conductors) must accompany the matching hot in the same cable or conduit.

Why is a ground rod at your house insufficient as a path for current returning to the utility pole transformer as the source? Because earth (dirt; soil; ground*) is not that great a conductor back to the ground rod at the utility pole.

Meanwhile the ground is the final destination for lightning although its poor conductivity together with the extremely high voltage difference between cloud and ground can still result in burning up of electrical wires and equipment and also widely varying voltage (potential) differences across the ground surface that can electrocute persons.

* As in (copied form another post):
(Customer) My coffee tastes like mud.
(Waiter) Well, it was ground this morning.
 
#27 ·
Big thanks, but how do I find the break? Info: its a simple square room, one receptacle on each wall, one doorway on one wall leading to other room. Do I start with an ohm meter? Will a $10 meter be adequate or do I not have the proper meter for this troubleshooting?

If this is way over my head, I will have to call a pro. Im still trying....

Last resort- do like allan said and go along exterior of house, inside wall, into panel from the front somehow)


Thaks!
 
#28 ·
You could get a toner set, sometimes called a fox and hound. This will let you trace the wiring without breaking open any walls.

Your splices should all be in accessible junction boxes so it should not be too hard to fix.
 
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#29 ·
Great, Jim. I would definitely like to follow this up. Home Depot item? Less than $500? Easy to use?

Thanks! (just came back from there......whew. learned that 3 of the boxes have pigtails and one does not. )
 
#32 ·
called HD to see if they had one and out of stock, but the guy there said it will work only with hot wire, not ground. Does this guy know what hes talking about? If hes right, why is it they also work for cable TV cables that done have that voltage? (scratching head, left elbow on desk.....)
 
#39 ·
I think what he's (guy at HD) might be referring to is they have a gadget you plug in, uses your 120 VAC, and it makes a ticking sound and you use the other device to trace the circuit. You can use it to figure out which receptacles are on the same circuit and vaguely find out which circuit breaker is associated with it, but it can tend to send the signal into other circuits since everything that is live is electrically connected to a degree.

What the other guys linked for you is what you'd need for tracing ground.
 
#34 ·
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