"Danny D'Amico"
** The simple answer is it doesn't - so the question is absurd.Home solar power goes nowhere until the current generated exceeds that being consumed by the house - the excess then goes to the neighbour's houses via the local grid.
Ground conductors plus the earth itself carry NO current UNLESS a fault exists.
Ground conductors exist for safety reasons.
FYI:
Ask Google a crazy question = get a crazy answer.
... Phil
Not true at all. The neutral will be required to be insulated after the service disconnect where the grounding electrode conductor lands and you will have to keep it separate from the ground after that. (typically 4 wires now)
At that point the ground can remain uninsulated. It does not matter if that is in a cable or in a conduit.
Read until you get to semi-conductors. Then read again:
I'd be perfectly happy to be wrong. It's not a contest.
This is a technical discussion.
We're just looking for a reference that supports the view that the earth is *not* the return path (since we only found references that support the view that it is).
High voltage A/C.
No, they are not.
Are your references from Australia?
Terminology, that is the question. Ground common? Hmmm, seems to be a non-North American phrase. But, we all know that the system is getting dumbed down and proper terminology is going out the window. It is hard to get people to excise the term "ground" from their perception of how a circuit works, much less how other aspects of safely implementation a power distribution system works, or the separation of enforcement and installation practices vary for each phase of the distribution. It would appear that Danny cannot separate utility from customer, or the exception from the rule. Nor does he understand charge, electric potential, electro motive force, or just electricity, in general.
Ah, a reference to Australia. :-)
If you put the reference clip of your scope on either L1 or L2 and you have not somehow floated (removed the ground from your scope) it will likely be the smokey end of the skope and maybe you.
It might be grandfathered in, but was never allowed in any new service installation I was ever around. Could just be local addendums to code. I don't think I have ever met a smart electrician that would pull a bare wire in a conduit run. Hell, most do not like pushing a metal fish-tape through an "in use" conduit. Those that do often pay the price. Heheh, I do have some stories on things of that nature.
If a neutral is allowed bare in a metallic conduit, then that conduit is now a charged entity, theoretically, and goes against the "only one bonding point to ground" rule. They wouldn't use insulators for the anchor point for messenger cables at the weatherhood, either.
Just sayin'...
And he COULD have been more accurate. He is wrong, for instance, in stating each tap takes off 2 phases. It GENERALLY takes off ONE phase
- which feeds a center tapped step-down distribution transformer. The primary of that thansformer has only 2 conductors, and a single winding. The secondary has 3 wires, and a center tapped winding, providing SINGLE PHASE power to the local residential grid.. There are 2 basic 3 phase connection schemes, delta and wye. Wye has a neutral (so requires 4 wires) while delta uses only 3 wires. Delta connections take power from l1 to l2, l2 to l3, and l3 to l1. Wye takes power from l1 to n, l2 to n and l3 to n.
BOTH are used. A 3 phase generator can be either delta or wye. In North America MOST systems are wye, while in other parts of the world delta is more common. (but in europe, 4 wire(wye) is used (400/230volt) Japan, on the other hand, uses a full 3 phase distribution system and does not use center tapped transformers to provide high/low voltage to homes - they actually feed 2 phases to each house like many MURBs in North America - so they get nominal 120/208 instead of 120/240. Both
50 and 60 hz are used, and much of the country is 100 volt, instead of 120 - and some is 115. (must be fun if moving from place to place within the country to get the right equipment ----)
Try
I know, it's only a WIKI, but in part it states: "A ground connection to local earth is normally provided for the customer's system as well as for the equipment owned by the utility. The purpose of connecting the customer's system to ground is to limit the voltage that may develop if high voltage conductors fall down onto lower-voltage conductors which are usually mounted lower to the ground, or if a failure occurs within a distribution transformer. If all conductive objects are bonded to the same earth grounding system, the risk of electric shock is minimized. However, multiple connections between the utility ground and customer ground can lead to stray voltage problems; customer piping, swimming pools or other equipment may develop objectionable voltages. These problems may be difficult to resolve since they often originate from places other than the customer's premises."
Only in some rather rare circumstances is the "ground" actually used in place of a current carrying conductor - eg. In New Zealand, Australia, Saskatchewan, Canada, and South Africa, single wire earth return systems SWER are used to electrify remote rural areas.Here they use galvanized iron wire in place of copper and run higher than normal voltages to compensate for the extra resistances involved. Obviously these are only single phase, single voltage distribution systems where a multi-tap transformer is used to adjust the end user voltage.
The "neutral" is NEVER bare in North America (except in some parts of rural Sakatchewan Canada, where single wire earth return IS actually still in limited use) In SWERT there is no "safety ground" and it is not uncommon to get a shock when standing on the "ground" and touching something that is connected to the "ground" some distance away - like a water trough, fed with a steel pipe from a somewhat distant water pump. If the trough is set on rock, or on a wooden base, and an animal is standing in the mud and goes to take a drink, they can recieve a rather nasty shock....
Danny D'Amico wrote in news:l70fka$n2e$ snipped-for-privacy@solani.org:
Depends mostly on how the wire is brought to the home -- overhead supply often (but not always) uses an uninsulated neutral, but IME underground supply *always* uses an insulated neutral.
I have given you a couple references that "prove" the ground is not GENERALLY used as the return, because they specifically mention the odd case where it DOES get used , SWERT, as an anomoly (being out of the ordinary)
Just admit it. You don't like to be "wrong" - but in this case, you and the sources you reference ARE.
snipped-for-privacy@snyder.on.ca wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com:
Absolute nonsense. You see bare neutrals all over the place in rural areas of the U.S. with overhead service.
Don't you think it's time you stopped assuming that what is true in your [obviously limited] experience is true everywhere?
Um, those are typical ITE style (Siemens subsidiary or bought out IIRC) with a tie handle. The difference is that what you have is a one piece unit, using two single-pole breakers, riveted together at the factory. However, those tie handles may be purchased and it is legal to install them on two separate single pole breakers. I still hate the set-up since in theory when one breaker trips the tie handle trips the other breaker. In theory *cough*. Actually, this version works better than some of the other designs I have seen.
I think you would have a hard time finding a two-phase breaker. Especially one for a 5-wire system. Though, in theory, a single pole breaker could be used for each hot leg of a 3-wire system installed in a single-phase panel. One would have to figure out the math for the magnetic trip portion of the breaker, or only have a current trip. Amperage by any power source is the same, period. Fuses work, too.
(removing tongue from check)
Yep. That's why you see the wire with the fancy stripe. :-) Generally you will only see the messenger cable used as a neutral for residential services. Poly- phase drops use four insulated conductors.
(Of course, the exception is the rule types will chime in.)
I've been kind of following this thread, and I can follow the notion that in a perfectly balanced electrical load the voltage and current sine waves would all cancel out when they met at the neutral wire and so there wouldn't be any current or voltage in either the neutral or ground wires.
But, in a real life situation, suppose I made a point of driving my CRT style TV sets (capacitive loads) and CRT style computer monitors with one power line coming into my house, and at the same time I used the other 120 VAC power line to provide power to all of the electric motors in my house, like the circulating pump on my hot water heating system, the motor in my garage door opener and the compressor motor in my fridge.
Now, according to ELI the ICE man, the current sine waves going through the motors is going to lag behind the applied voltage sine wave, while the current sine waves coming out of the CRT style TV sets and computer monitors is going to precede the applied voltage sine wave. That would mean that the current sine waves returning to the main panel along the white wires would occur at different times, and therefore NOT cancel each other out completely.
Now, I cannot fit it into my head that the voltage sine waves in the neutral wires coming back from those two kinds of loads would cancel each other completely in the neutral buss in the main panel, but not the current sine waves. That would mean that you'd have some NET current sine wave, and therefore current, without any driving voltage.
In order for there to be some NET current sine wave, there HAS TO BE some net voltage sine wave in the white neutral buss in the main panel where all the white wires meet to drive that current.
And I can't see why that net voltage sine wave wouldn't energize the ground cable coming out of the main panel and cause current to flow through that cable and into and out of the Good Earth.
What am I missing here?
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