Comments by "ke6gwf - Ben Blackburn" (@ke6gwf) on "Ground Neutral and Hot wires explained - electrical engineering grounding ground fault" video.

I am impressed by how much you got right, on normally misunderstood subjects such as the the current flow "to ground" and return to source, it would almost think that you watched some of Mike Holt's rants on this lol I do have 2 nit picks however. You said that current uses the ground wire because it is very low resistance, and so it returns via the ground wire instead of the neutral, and that's not correct. A ground wire has the same resistance as the neutral, because they are both the same type of copper, and in cases of reduced size Grounding conductors, the resistance may even be higher. It doesn't matter, because all it it has to do is flow enough current to trip the breaker, and that doesn't require lower resistance than the neutral. If a hot is connected to the ground and the neutral during a fault, current will flow back on both, but since assumably the neutral is still connected via the load, it will be the load limiting the current flow through the neutral, but hot to ground has no current limiting, and that's what trips the breaker, bypassing the load, not the resistance in the ground wire. The other thing is, I know it is technically correct that the electrons flow the opposite direction that we say, but you are confusing things putting the batteries in backwards, especially in an ac system with reversing current. So please just put the batteries in the way everyone else does, and don't confuse the visuals lol
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That's actually false. It only will go to Ground, if the Source is also connected to Ground. So it isn't "going to ground", it is using ground as a current path to return to the Source. And FYI, if you hook a 120v hot wire directly up to a ground rod, you will get less than 5 amps to flow. (not enough to trip the breaker) Whereas if you hook it up to the neutral wire, you will have several thousand amps flow. This is why it is so important to bond the Grounding conductor to the neutral, and only in the correct location.
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In an A/C system, each wire reverses from "positive" to "negative" at 60 hz. So, no lol
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@Awesomekid2283 the confusion is that every single Duracell battery out there is actually properly installed so that the Positive terminal is connected to the Hot wire. Here he is showing the Negative terminal to the hot wire, which will cause bad things to happen in real life. If this were just a theory video, ok, fine, but he's trying to show how practical electricity works, but he's connecting the negative terminal to the hot wire. It's backwards in other words.
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A properly connected Neutral will always be at the same potential as ground, which is zero volts. However, it carries current from the load back to the source, and so if you disconnect or cut the neutral wire, the end connected to the load now is no longer pulled down by being connected to the source neutral/ground, and so it ends up at the same voltage as the hot wire. This is the only way that you can get shocked by a neutral, is to disconnect it while it is under load, and then touch the now Hot end.
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If you connect 120 volts to a standard ground rod (with no other bonding wires connected) you will get less than 5 amps of current flow, so it won't trip the breaker or anything else, and will just sit there heating the ground up around the rod. The earth is a pretty good conductor, once you get further away from the ground rod (exponential increase of current paths in each larger sphere expanding out from the ground rod) and so the further away from the ground rod that you are standing, the higher the voltage potential will be. I think it was like 90 volts at 2 feet, or something like that. So if you walk up to an energized ground rod, you will get enough current flow to your feet to kill you, even though the breaker won't trip. Oh, and because each sphere has its own potential, as you took a step, the potential between one foot and the other would kill you. That's why they say that if you find yourself near a downed power line or other high voltage in contact with the ground, to keep your feet pressed together and shuffle, otherwise you will step into 2 different spheres. It's also how people are electrocuted in pools, because you get the same voltage gradient and potential difference across the different spheres in the water, and your body bridges between distant spheres, this high voltage potential.
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Yes, if you look at the diagram shown there, the bonding wire from the ground rod to the neutral buss is removed, so only the hot wire is connected to the ground rod. According to Mike Holt's testing, the current flow would be about 4.8 amps using 120 volts.
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He is trying to demonstrate that electrons flow the opposite direction that we tend to think, but he's doing it by putting a battery in backwards, and making things more confusing lol Yes, Positive should ALWAYS go to the hot wire, and Negative should ALWAYS go to the Ground wire! (unless you are talking about certain British cars with Positive Earth electrical systems, in which case Hot should go to the detonator, because they are best blown up, rather than fixing... ;)
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@HelloKittyFanMan. , the batteries are backwards, because the positive terminal of a battery is connected to the Red "Hot" wire in nearly all real life circuits DC circuits, and the negative terminal is nearly always connected to the ground wire, which is the opposite of the hot wire. And AC also has a hot and a ground, and while the color codes tend to be different, with some overlap (red is hot in both), the concept of Positive being Hot is always the case, except for some old British cars... So putting the Red wire on the negative terminal is backwards, according to all standard uses. And that's obviously a Duracell battery, so it's taking a theoretical concept of the flow of electrons (which is correct, but unimportant for practical house wiring, since you need to know Potential, not direction of electron flow) and mixing it into a practical electrical system, and reversing what anyone who actually works with electricity is used to. For clarity, when you are connecting a battery, ALWAYS connect the Positive + terminal to the Hot wire!! Bad things happen otherwise. Lol
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@HelloKittyFanMan. Oh, and Grounding was capitalized because it is a term of art, referencing specific language in the code book. That is to differentiate it from the Grounded Conductor, which is also sometimes called the Neutral wire, usually white.
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@QuantumRift if you are standing on the ground, what potential is your body at? Ground potential. What potential is the white wire at? If the white wire is bonded to the ground, then the white wire is at ground potential, the same as you are, this with no potential difference, you can't get shocked. It doesn't have to do with current flow, it has to do with relative potential. For instance, if I am standing on an insulated surface, so isolated from ground, I can touch a hot wire, and as soon as I do, I now am at the same potential as the hot wire. And I am not getting shocked, because there is no potential difference between me and the wire. Just like how the guys work on the high voltage transmission lines, once they are on the wire, they are at a half million volt potential, with millions of watts flowing through the wires, but there is no potential difference, so they don't get shocked. Do you understand a little bit better now?
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