polarized power plug

whoaru99 said:

Ground loops are often the fault of a problem in the systems of the house, not that the of equipment with grounding conductor. For example, faulty/poor bonding of the CATV service drop to the dwelling grounding system is not uncommon. This can result in ground loop problems. Devices with the grounding plug may cause that bonding problem to be revealed, but they didn't cause the bonding problem. Nor does use of two-prong plug make the root cause (the poor/faulty bond) go away.

As to the Code, generally it's about safety, not whether using equipment grounding causes noise in your stereo. If it does, maybe look to an underlying cause, not a cheater plug, et al. I'm not saying that is your implication, just making a general statement.

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lini said:

kh:

A) maybe for a couple of seconds, until the water reaches the contacts inside the hairdrier...

B) rather not

c) also not really, as there would be no leakage current, unless it would be a bucket made of conductive material placed on a conductive and grounded surface...

D) yup - the fuse/circuit breaker should be triggered by the short circuit, as soon as the water reaches the contacts inside the hairdrier

greetings from munich!

Manfred / lini

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Kingshead said:

Since we're discussing grounding here:

I have a multiple choice question for the members posting here. If I fill a bucket with water, plug a hand held hair dryer into a GFCI protected receptacle, then drop the hair dryer into the bucket what do you think will happen?

A) The hair dryer will act as a water pump.

B) The hair dryer will explode.

C) The GFCI will trip.

D) None of the above.

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lini said:

Kh:
D) yup - the fuse/circuit breaker should be triggered by the short circuit, as soon as the water reaches the contacts inside the hairdrier

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whoaru99 said:

+1, mostly, although depending on the conductivity of the water in the bucket (is it filled with distilled water ) the breaker may not trip and it might sorta act like a pump for a fair bit of time.

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wa2ise said:

If it's a plastic bucket, or a metal bucket sitting on a non-conductive surface, the GFCI won't trip. As there's no path for the electric current to go except the other pin of the 2 pin power plug.

If you didn't turn the hair dryer on, then "D". You didn't mention turning it on... Maybe some leakage across the open switch contacts.

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WaynerN said:

Ground faults in hifi are generally caused by having multiple components grounded to the electrical system's safety ground (not neutral) at multiple points. This induces eddy currents between components.

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cycletemp said:

Try this at home

After Franklin, came a herd of Electrical Pioneers whose names have become part of our electrical terminology: Myron Volt, Mary Louise Amp, James Watt, Bob Transformer, etc. These pioneers conducted many important electrical experiments. For example, in 1780 Luigi Galvani discovered that when he attached two different kinds of metal to the leg of a frog, and electrical current developed and the frog's leg kicked, even though it was no longer actually attached to the frog, which was dead anyway. Galvani's discovery led to enormous advances in the field of amphibian medicine. Today, skilled veterinary surgeons can take a frog that has been seriously injured or killed, implant pieces of metal in its muscles, and watch it hop back into the pond just like a normal frog, except for the fact that it sinks like a stone.

But the greatest Electrical Pioneer of all was Thomas Edison, who was a brilliant inventor despite the fact that he had little formal education and lived in New Jersey. Edison's first major invention, in 1877, was the phonograph, which could soon be found in thousands of American homes, where it basically just sat until 1923, when the record was invented. But Edison's greatest achievement came in 1879, when he invented the electric company. Edison's design was a brilliant adaptation of the simple electrical circuit: The electric company sends electricity through a wire to a customer, then immediately gets the electricity back through another wire, then (this is the brilliant part) sends it right back to the customer again. This means that an electric company can sell a customer the same batch of electricity thousands of times a day and never get caught, since very few consumers take the time to examine their electricity closely. In fact, the last year in which any new electricity was generated in the United States was 1937. The electric companies have been merely re-selling it ever since, which is why they have so much free time to apply for rate increases.

Today, thanks to men like Edison and Franklin, and frogs like Galvani's, we receive almost unlimited benefits from electricity. For example, in the past decade scientists developed the laser, an electronic appliance that emits a beam of light so powerful that it can vaporize a bulldozer 2,000 yards away, yet so precise that doctors can use it to perform delicate operations on the human eyeball, provided they remember to change the power setting from "VAPORIZE BULLDOZER" to "DELICATE."

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