DaveU
New Member
Hello,
I live on an acreage in Saskatchewan, Canada, and recently had an electrical contractor out to provide buried service to the house. Because our house is about 30 years old, he also spent a bit of time bringing things up to code, apparently a requirement.
One of the improvements he did was run a ground wire from the breaker box to the cold water pipe. Now, I understand why this is done in the city, where the cold water pipe is inherently grounded – but in my case, I have an internal cistern/pump arrangement and none of the pipes extend outside the house, consequently they are NOT providing any sort of ground point. When I brought this fact to the electrician’s attention, he insisted that it was still the right thing to do. Since then, I have talked to several electricians and they’re all rather vague on this issue.
The way I see it, in my situation, that ground wire is more of a potential hazard than a safeguard. I haven’t disconnected it yet, but I really think I should – if anything goes wrong, my water pipes would become electrically “hotâ€. As it stands, it does about as much good as if I ran it to my metal stair railing.
Thanks for your help on this,
Regards,
Dave
I live on an acreage in Saskatchewan, Canada, and recently had an electrical contractor out to provide buried service to the house. Because our house is about 30 years old, he also spent a bit of time bringing things up to code, apparently a requirement.
One of the improvements he did was run a ground wire from the breaker box to the cold water pipe. Now, I understand why this is done in the city, where the cold water pipe is inherently grounded – but in my case, I have an internal cistern/pump arrangement and none of the pipes extend outside the house, consequently they are NOT providing any sort of ground point. When I brought this fact to the electrician’s attention, he insisted that it was still the right thing to do. Since then, I have talked to several electricians and they’re all rather vague on this issue.
The way I see it, in my situation, that ground wire is more of a potential hazard than a safeguard. I haven’t disconnected it yet, but I really think I should – if anything goes wrong, my water pipes would become electrically “hotâ€. As it stands, it does about as much good as if I ran it to my metal stair railing.
Thanks for your help on this,
Regards,
Dave