Do Older Homes Have Proper & Safe Electrical Ground Wiring?
Often an older building has poor or no working local electrical ground, relying instead on the incoming neutral wire from the electrical service. Or the building’s main electrical ground may have relied on connection to a metal water pipe connected to a well; we’ve found building ground wires connected to a metal water pipe which used to run out of the building and into earth (possibly a pretty effective ground) but where the metal piping exiting the building had been replaced with a newer plastic water line between the well and the building. In other words the local ground was completely ineffective. Modern electrical grounding at residential properties requires use of one or more grounding electrodes connected by an un-spliced wire between the electrode and the ground and neutral bus in the main electrical panel. Bare aluminum electrical ground wires are sometimes found to have corroded entirely through where the wire touched a damp foundation wall. We also find that the ground wire
