![]() The third wire was officially a neutral, but allowed to do double duty as ground in this one application only. bad bad bad bad bad !ģ prong dryer outlets were a special exception allowed starting in WW2 to deal with a copper shortage. When you try to make a ground do double duty as a neutral, any wiring fault in the panel could potentially turn that ground and the metal frame of grounded appliance hot with line voltage. ![]() Its there to insure that a short circuit trips a circuit breaker. ![]() It is a path for fault circuit current to go to the ground and not into a human. ![]() Old 2 prong 120v outlets were ungrounded - neutral was always a dedicated, insulated conductor even in the knob and tube days.Ī ground is a safety feature ONLY. ground was never a current carrying conductor in a 120v circuit EVER. If you backfeed and kill a lineman who wasn't using PPE, then it's not your fault? :bug: 00001% chance of killing someone by backfeeding. But, there was NO WAY I was going to take even a. I installed a transfer switch/sub-panel and outside receptacle 3 years ago - $300 and a good amount of work to re-route lots of wires. And +1 to not backfeeding, where there is any chance of powering into the grid. Unless someone who designs and builds generators for a living can guarantee that this cannot damage a genset, I wouldn't try it. So, brand new these gensets aren't producing great power, and chopping off the neutral prong could only potentially make things worse. It also changes the way our microwave runs, which in turn makes the oil burner motor change pitch. My generator is a typical non-inverter, and causes my wood boiler controller to be unusable. All of the non-inverter gensets create "dirty" power, with high enough harmonic distortion to affect some motors and electronic equipment. I wouldn't make any changes that MIGHT affect my generator. That said, electricity will work in many different installations and you may think it is safe, however if you really do not know all the variables what are you energizing you may not want to be? I would not comfortable back feeding circuits with plugs downstream. If I was out of power and wanted to jerry rig a circuit or two that I wanted to temporarily energize and did not have a transfer switch I would isolate them from the panel and wire nut a cord ends on them plug them into the receptacles on the generator. If you want to test your generator, plug something into it that creates a load and enjoy. Will it harm your new generator? That depends on how you wire your cord end. The grounding conductors job is to bond metallic objects that may come in contact with the phase conductors, so they are not energized without tripping the breaker(over current protection device). It is not a good practice to allow the bare(grounding conductor) to do the job of the neutral. The code has changed so that the installation of multi-wire circuits are not sharing neutrals without a means of disconnect. This just simply separates the ground circuit and neutral circuit versus having the ground line act as a neutral in the older circuit above.The main job of the neutral(grounded conductor) is to carry the imbalanced amperes between the hots (phase conductors). The neutral line is a return line for the voltage and should not be done through the green ground wire, even though a neutral and ground are really the same, so new codes require a dedicated neutral line as well as a dedicated ground line. The difference between this diagram and the 4-prong outlet below is the addition of a neutral wire. If your running a new circuit, I highly recommend that you bring your outlet up to code and install a 4-prong dryer outlet. Now a 3-prong outlet is outdated from modern electrical codes but is accepted if you already have one in your home. This size breaker requires a minimum of a #10 gauge wire so this wire used would be a 10/2 with ground. This circuit originates from the breaker box containing a 2-pole 30 Amp breaker. The 3 prong wiring diagram above shows the proper connections for both ends of the circuit.
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