Grounding Electrical Panel

Your service panel s ground wire prevents a line fault from becoming a shocking experience.

Grounding electrical panel.

This is a brief walk through of a simple grounding and bonding system and what happens with the flow of current in normal operation and in a ground fault c. Which scenario is recommended. When this happens you must bring an appropriately sized equipment grounding conductor over with the circuit to the subpanel you must not have a neutral to ground bond in the panel and the grounding electrodes are optional although highly recommended. Alternatively you might consider connecting the ground terminal to a water pipe by means of an exposed ground wire.

Because the panel must be connected to the. Distance from the electrical panel nec article 250 does not specify a minimum or maximum distance between the main electrical panel and the ground rod. The grounding pathway is generally formed by a system of bare copper wires that connect to every device and every metal electrical box in your home. They work hand in hand in order to make it safe.

The grounding wire that runs from your electrical panel to grounding electrode helps even out voltage increases that often occur because of lightning and other causes. Two problems make the safety of these approaches questionable. Grounding a main panel the ground bar is bonded internally when an external bond to earth is installed as described at the link for electrical grounding below. The connection is often unreliable.

By shunting excess line voltage back to the panel s neutral pole the ground current forces the circuit breaker to trip. If your electrical cables have metal sheathing that runs all the way to the panel the sheathing can serve as a ground path. The tripped breaker shuts off the circuit s current preventing a potentially dangerous situation.