Okay, so if there is something in the house drawing current, shouldn't there be voltage travelling through the neutral? Working in a live box saturday, I was awefully close to the bare service neutral. What would happen if I touched it with bare hands? with something metal? something grounded?
Your conception of voltage and current are wrong. Voltage isn't flowing through the neutral, current is. What would happen if you touched the neutral, nothing would happen if it was installed and bonded correctly. It would be the same as touching the cover of your panel, the sides of your panel, any grounded metal object in your house, taking a shower or washing your hands. The neutral is bonded to your grounding system making everything connected to it the same potential. Current can't flow without a difference in potential.
Assuming that your house is properly grounded and bonded.
Now that being said, don't just grap any neutral because if it isn't landed you could complete a path back to ground and get zapped. One of the worst shocks I ever had was off a switched neutral, homeowners work.
The neutral is referred to as the "grounded conductor" because, although it is conducting current, it is grounded.
Like Silk said, as long as the grounded path back to the source is complete, the electrons will choose that path. If it gets interrupted, they will find another way and you do NOT want it to be through you. Human bodies DO conduct electricity, just not very efficiently.
This would happen if he opened a neutral and placed himself between the line and load. At that point, one side ceases to be a neutral and becomes a hot.
As Silk stated earlier- don't just grap any neutral because if it isn't landed you could complete a path back to ground and get zapped. It wasn't landed and he was in the path back to ground.
So basiclly the moral of the story is never assume that a neutral doesn not have current flowing through it?
On a somewhat related note, when you have say a light on a switch that is gfi protected, with the cct live but the switch off, and you clip the neutral going to the light why does the gfi trip?
No, you shouldn't care if the neutral has current flowing through it or not. You should care if it is at the same potential (voltage) as earth and the rest of your groundng and bonding system, which should be zero.
In reality it should be the same potential as your grounding and bonding system, but earth is another matter, for another day.
Okay, I am confused by your statment that a person shouldn't care about current or vontage. If there is ever a potential, then shouldn't someone always be concerned about it?
I never said you shouldn't be concerned about voltage, actually I said the exact opposite. You are confusing the terms voltage, current and potential. First thing is to learn what the difference between voltage and current is.
Just to clarify, in your original post when you talked about "almost touching a bare service neutral", you were talking about the neutral lug on you lighting panel, right? Was the neutral landed? I assumed this was an existing, working panel.
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