Grounding Wire Tips from Local Home Inspector Gary Daggett with Daggett Property Inspections
There are many home maintenance tips that are important to not only the proper running of your home but also the safety of your home, one of these items is the grounding wire.
A grounding wires function is to be in place should your house get hit with a major electrical surge. The idea is that the grounding wire absorbs the extra electricity that hits the house and disperses the extra electricity down the grounding post. A ground wire provides a conducting path to the earth which is independent of the normal current-carrying path in an electrical appliance
One of the things a good inspector will look for during inspection is to make sure that the electrical service on the property is grounded. Typically, you’re going to see is a grounding wire that’s supposed to go to a post that’s in the ground. That post goes about nine feet down and it grounds all the electrical in the house, so if you get a lightning strike or a major surge, it’s going to transfer that overload down into the ground instead of sending it through your house and blowing up your TVs and microwaves. This is a very important item to have in good working order on your home as it is also a safety issue. You want to make sure that your electrical supply is grounded, it’s not a huge deal for a qualified electrician to add it, but it’s something you definitely want to look for. The post is usually found about a foot away from the home. The post should go down about nine feet down. You’ll have a clamp and then you’ll have a grounding wire coming to it. Couple thing you want to make sure is, you want to make sure that it is solidly clamped to the grounding wire. If it gets popped off, then it’s not going to do you any good. You also want to make sure that the grounding cable that’s coming out, or the tab that’s coming out is solidly in place. In a situation where we have some stranding of the wire coming loose, the danger is you might get more amperage coming through one than another and kind of melt it out. You really want these to be connected, so in situation where the wire is fraying you would want to take the tab off, rewind it, put some coating on it, and put it back on. When in doubt call a professional electrician to handle this for you; they can also run a new ground wire if necessary. Make sure you’ve got a good connection with your cable, and if you don’t, get an electrician out quickly just to look and tell you what it’s going to need to get it up to speed. The grounding wire is typically close to where your supply coming in and your box is, so if you have a supply coming in from underground, it’s going to be close to where the electrical supply goes into the house. If you have aby questions or concerns its best to have a professional electrician come out and look