What is the difference between ground and neutral from the perspective of the wall outlet working backward to the power company? (2025 Update)

What a GFCI will do is make a marginal ground effective to open the GFCI in a fault.

More accurately, a GFCI provides protection similar to the protection provided by a functional ground in the event of an electrical malfunction in a device plugged into the outlet.

Better protection, I would say. You could have a 10 amp short to the metal case and with a ground, the breaker won't trip and you could have a fire. With a gfci 6ma and it trips.

The difference is a grounding path that provides 1000 ohms or so to the MBJ is not much help in clearing a fault with a 15 or 20a breaker but it will open a GFCI.

The nice thing about AFCI/GFCIs is that they trip when your mandatory fire sprinklers go off.  You can never have too many $afety device$ in your home.  Remember, they're for the kids.

You got me curious so I just looked.

My ancient Maytag washer has a clamp for a ground wire on the back. My water supply has a clamp and a ground wire on it (pipes are copper in this 1962 house.) I don't remember when I bought the washer but it was probably around 1992.

Second thing, we've never confirmed the OP washer is plugged into a three prong outlet. It very well might be a two prong and they've used an adapter. The reason I bring that up is some years ago I was working in a paper factory and I got a shock from one of the office computers. The outlet was wired backwards, there was no safety ground (they assumed the conduit was enough, but it wasn't), and the case was hot. Hooking up a cable I had one hand on the computer and the other on a grounded connection, and I got that old familiar tingle. The PC ran fine hooked up either way.

Yes, I think we've confirmed that washers did come with attachment points for connection to a separate ground, at least up until some point in time. Not sure what you're referring to about the copper water pipe having a ground wire, but you probably mean that it's grounded to the system at the panel, which it should be.

The reason I bring that up is some years ago I was working in a paper factory and I got a shock from one of the office computers. The outlet was wired backwards, there was no safety ground (they assumed the conduit was enough, but it wasn't),

It's not an assumption, metal conduit is allowed by code to serve as the grounding conductor. But like everything else, you can manage to screw it up and if you can reverse hot and neutral you surely can screw the ground.

This is what gets people killed, multiple faults and/or things wired incorrectly. The PC had a fault, ie the case should not be hot just because hot and neutral were reversed. The wiring was done wrong with no ground. Fortunately such situations are apparently rare. It also shows why GFCI are a good idea.