The difference between neutral and ground on the electric panel

okay what I wanted to do with this yo let's do a little on the difference between neutral and ground I did a video earlier on the three wire system and explained something about the neutral ground and the difference between them but I'm going to gonna go a little bit farther on this one and see if I can explain this a little bit more now here's your power pole you've got l1 and l2 it comes off there and then you have a neutral if you look at the power line coming off of the pole you'll see two black insulated wires that's l1 and l2 and the neutral is bare okay when it comes into the main panel this is a main panel here there is a connection between the neutral on the pole and the neutral bar in the panel there is also a jumper that goes from neutral to ground now this is ground here and this is earth ground and of course it has a bar also now I want to compare this Pam this main panel I got my two hots coming down to the terminals here and I got breakers and then I've got a sub panel here okay the sub panel has the ground and new neutral wired differently notice that my ground bar here is not connected to the neutral they are separate and this is the way it's supposed to be this is how supposed to be designed so I have one side of power coming in here going through say another breaker in the sub panel I put the sub panel in there just to illustrate the difference a subpanel is from a main panel the sub panel cannot have the ground and the neutral connected together okay let's follow a little farther out I've got my ground coming to an outlet the outlet ground goes over to the chassis of the load you see I've got a light here and it's got Sam metal encasing and this is a chassis ground now all that means is that when I put this terminal on here that it the ground is hooked to the body of the lobe okay now I've got a hot lead right here comes down to here passes over and feeds one side of my look I've got a neutral here that comes over to the neutral bar comes down goes over and feeds the other side of the load okay why do we put that extra wire in why don't we just use the neutral because it's all connected to get on the panel anyway the reason for this is the neutral is a current carrying wire if I have power going through this it comes from the hot over to the load through the load back to the load through the neutral and to the main panel okay it is a current carrying load from here to here I have a separate ground which we call our safety ground that is mounted to the chassis of the load goes back to the ground goes to the ground here and over to the ground here it should not be carrying power under normal situation you don't want your ground to be carrying power the problem was with this is let's say I had a loose wire on the ground let's say I eliminated this neutral line right here and just use the ground I could hook the ground right to here if I did that it would be a current carrying wire if for some reason that ground wire was broken no longer had continuity then I would have no chassis ground on this load and the load would be hot that would mean power from here is energizing this entire box so if I touch that box and I happen to be touching something else that's grounded then I become part of the load and I get a shock so we don't use the ground as a current carrying wire we separate them in every panel sub panel and you could call this a little panel - they are separate now why do we even have a ground the neutral should be fine the neutral should take care of all the the power coming back the balancing power coming back the problem is we oftentimes get lightning strikes on power poles on wires maybe something in our house we need some place for it to discharge to rather than go into the house and burn up all the wiring in the house so let's say I got a lightning strike out here it would come through that neutral go to the ground and then go to the earth ground and that just feeds it off a lot of people think that power is actually going through this ground under normal circumstances it is not power is not going through this the resistance of dirt is way too high for any kind of load to go through it and even if it did it would add it would create an anode of the ground wire and corrode the groundwater so it's not a current-carrying wire and in these sub panels we separate it because we want to make sure it is not a current-carrying wire if for some reason if I had connected these two together right here okay and then I had a fault or this wire failed this neutral wire failed then it would the load would run normally and it would go back through the ground it would come through here here here and then go back through the ground and back to the panel and there would be no the breaker wouldn't kick off or anything like that however you've just made this panel hot again so you don't want to have those connected because you want the circuit protection to kick it off if one of these fails certainly if I had a power I had a lead coming through here going to here and that's hot if for some reason something burned up in thing and I got a direct connection to the chassis of this load I want it to kick off I want to kick the the circuit protection off and shut it down so it's no longer hot that's what we're talking about with this I hope this makes a little more sense it took me years years to figure this silly thing out too because I couldn't figure it out either but main panels we tire tie the neutral to ground together so that we can go to the ground by the way that round here that's usually a ground rod or it can be a water pipe now there's a bunch of different codes on this but you usually have to have a separate ground rod not just a water pipe so anyway I hope this makes sense so many questions if it doesn't

Channel: grayfurnaceman

Views: 2,264,635

Rating: 4.6031003 out of 5

Keywords: difference, neutral, ground, electric, electric panel, panel grounding

Id: -n8CiU_6KqE

Length: 10min 11sec (611 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 26 2014