What is a Neutral? The Difference Between Grounded and Grounding Conductors.

what's going on my friends this is  dustin selzer with electrician you   today we are going to answer  the question what is a neutral   so there are a couple of different ways that  we can look at a neutral and in code uh for the   longest time a neutral is just called a grounded  conductor you would hear things like the neutral   point in a system but they didn't really go by  neutral and most of this book they call it the   grounded conductor which is confusing because  there's an ungrounded conductor and there's   a grounding conductor so when they talk about  grounding a lot of the times as an electrician   you think they're talking about the ground but  they're actually talking about the neutral and   they're calling it the grounded conductor so the  first thing i think is a good idea is to look at   article 100 of the national electric code we're in  the 2020 code book what do they consider a neutral   more specifically neutral conductor it says the  conductor connected to the neutral point of a   system that is intended to carry current under  normal conditions so it's a conductor connected   to the neutral point of a system so if we're going  to talk about the neutral point let's say from our   utility company we've got these conductors that  come in right we're up in a utility transformer   inside of a transformer you know  you've got your two incoming wires   and then you've got a coil of wire  essentially uh that is your primary   side so i'm going to call this p for primary  then our secondary side let's say that we've got less uh less of those windings right so  our primary voltage will just say we're at   7200 volts and on our secondary side we'll just  say that we have 240 volts well in this system   that's still just two different hots and two  different hots here right so we're just taking   and inducing a voltage into the secondary but  there's no neutral that's like run in with here   that like traverses over and jumps over to here  so usually at our electrical service we generate   a neutral so what we call the neutral point  is a point in the system where we tap off of   so let's say in the middle of this coil we tap  this in the exact center and we come out with a   conductor well if there's 240 between our two hots  then we've got 120 between each hot and neutral   but still 240 between them so this is what  we would call the neutral point so again   code says that the neutral conductor is a  conductor connected to the neutral point of   the system that is intended to carry current  under normal conditions so they are intending   for this conductor to carry current so if we've  got loads on this say we've got like a light bulb   that's connected we're going to be going from this  would actually be backwards the the bottom would   be where the hot comes in the neutral would be  where the shell is we're just conceptualizing this   here so don't get like crazy about the details  so we would have current flowing back and forth   60 times a second on this and say  over here we've got like a microwave   right like we got a little cord that goes here  and uh out of that cord we're tapped into the   neutral so we would have some current that's going  from hot to neutral here and some current that's   going hot to neutral here they're going to be in  reverse order because if the if the current is   pulling back and forth on the 240 volt system  there's going to be some current that's going   this direction and some current that's going  this direction the whole time so that's why   the currents in the neutral balance out so  if say our light bulb if we had like two amps   flowing on this 120 volt side through the light  bulb but we've got 10 amps flowing through this   circuit going through the microwave then we have  an imbalance that's happening so the neutral is   always going to carry whatever that imbalance  is because again we have some going in and some   going out so we have to subtract those things  so we would end up having eight amps of current   traveling on that neutral conductor the neutral  can really just be thought of as the same thing   as the two hots it's just another conductor that  gives us half of that voltage so instead of you   having a full 220 volt or 240 volt circuit now you  have two smaller 120 volt circuits so really you   can kind of think of it as an ungrounded conductor  it's just or a hot but it's just that we're not   we've attached it to the neutral point so we  call it a neutral so the reason that we call it   a grounded conductor is this conductor is actually  intentionally grounded it's intentionally brought   to earth so we are able to call it a different  thing we call it the grounded conductor while   neither of these would be considered grounded  they are the ungrounded conductors so that's why   we have hot neutral underground and grounded now  a ground ding conductor is a completely different   thing we'll get into that a little bit more at a  later time but any kind of circuits that we have   that we run to things we always have a ground that  goes over to our system we call it an equipment   grounding conductor at our service we have a  thing called a grounding electrode conductor   which is a conductor that goes to an electrode  in the earth which is also grounding the system   but that's where these terms get  kind of confusing so let's just   understand what a neutral is it's really  just another ungrounded conductor but it   is intentionally grounded so we call  it the grounded conductor in code this can't music and video you

Channel: Electrician U

Views: 240,712

Keywords: electrician, electrical, electricity, dustin stelzer, electrician vlog, construction, commercial, residential, electrical vlog, electrical courses, electrician courses, electrical class, electrician class, electrician school, Draw, Whiteboard, electrical Class, apprentice, what is a neutral, electrical theory, theory, artistically sparky, neutral conductor, grounded conductor, transformers, neutral, line man, physics, grounded, grounding, ungrounded, white, green, hot, transformer, phase, marker

Id: J80Qr6EWJJ0

Length: 6min 13sec (373 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 01 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/JohnnyComeLately84]

Great explanation, especially using the unbalanced neutral between the light and microwave.