Please don’t take this personally, but I am extremely unrelenting when it comes to electrical theory, safety and practice.
We just lost a well-known member of this forum to electrocution while working on his aquarium.
Your initial post contained a mix of incorrect and potentially dangerous information. My response was meant to clear up confusion, but instead your responses doubled down. You have shifted the goal posts to a broad scope, added more incorrect or partially correct information and irrelevant discussion and terminology that only make the subject harder for people to understand. I am going to respond to several of the points, and I am going to kindly urge you to step away from this conversation instead of making it a bigger mess.
If you can't see your way to doing that, I will take the rare stance of asking the staff to lock this thread. Well meaning or not, you are providing both poorly articulated and factually incorrect information about electrical service wiring, associated dangers and how they related to aquariums.
it would more so be check to make sure no one used a ground wire as a neutral wire. I try to put things in layman's terms for others to understand which I'm not always the best at, but hey I try.
While miswiring a circuit is improper and can be dangerous, it has no bearing on the grounded aquarium itself. To that end the GFCI Circuit tester being discussed in this thread is precisely the tool that a homeowner can use to flag miswired neutrals, reverse polarity receptacles, missing neutrals or missing grounds.
In any case, let's focus on the missing neutral or equipment ground acting as neutral:
The whole point of the service bond is that all equipment grounds in the home are tied to the same reference.
A ground wire being incorrectly used as a neutral somewhere else does not suddenly make every other correctly wired circuit unsafe. It just means
that circuit is potentially unsafe. The grounded aquarium is still referenced to the bonded service exactly like everything else.
Want to argue lifted bond? Bad neutral from the pole? Those fall under the same issue as the improperly wired neutral. They are inspection issues.. but let's address the rest of your points before getting back to that.
I did mess up by implying neutral and ground blocks do different things. Its the wire pathways that do different things. In practice, its been instilled into me to never land neutral and grounds on the same block as there are two blocks for a reason essentially. To me and my work, a neutral on a ground bar is incorrect.
It doesn't matter. Facts are what matters.
You’re describing a rule that applies to sub-panels and misapplying it to the main service panel.
A neutral landed on a ground bar is only incorrect in a sub-panel. But even if branch circuit neutrals are miswired in the sub-panel, it has a large bonding conductor that must be tied to the main (bonded) panel. So there are still two high current, low resistance parallel paths back to the main bond.
In the main service panel, it is normal and expected to see grounds and neutrals landed on the same bus bar. Why? There is not a difference between the ground bus and neutral bus in a bonded panel. The neutral bus has a bonding screw that connects it electrically (bonds it) to the panel chassis. They are electrically the same and can be used for grounds or neutrals. Full Stop.
But lets make a very important distinction. While a ground connected to a hot will still function, it is not correct and can be very dangerous to do this even with a bonded panel.
“A ground conductor tied to a hot doesn’t ‘still function’... No, it creates a direct fault that will trip the breaker!
I assume (am sure) you meant an equipment ground being used as a neutral. The service bond is what makes that behave “safely” in practice, even though it’s still improper.
I am going to also point out that even though I understand what you were
trying to say, most people here would not, and miswordings things like that are serious oversights and part of the reason I am taking the time to respond.
The neutral block carries the current back to the utility but the ground block only carries it to ground.
Not even close. Neutral and ground are bonded together by code!! The bonding is done at the main point of service (that is the panel in most residential services) and again at the utilities transformer feeding your panel. They are not separate “paths”! They share the same reference point. The only thing separate is the branch circuit wiring back to that bond, which provides two return paths for safety.
There are 2 very common myths regarding electricity. Myth 1: Electricity is 'trying to get to ground or the Earth'. This is not true and I have heard many stories of people who created harmful situations because they believed this. Fact 1: Electricity is 'trying to get back to it's source'.
You’ve replaced one “myth” with another... but neither is actually myth. Both are just oversimplified teaching analogies. The fact is simple. Current flows according to the available conductive paths and their impedances. Higher potential to lower potential. Full Stop.
Myth 2: Electricity takes the path of least resistance. If this were true, it would be impossible to connect circuits in parallel, because the electricity would only take the parallel path which has the least resistance. Electrical theory and Kirchhoff's Law tell us this isn't true. Fact 2: Electricity takes ALL paths available to it.
Let me help you there -- "Electricity takes
ALL" conductive paths, but the current in each path is proportional to that path’s impedance relative to the others.
It is my opinion that you'll sooner have a device fail inside the home much sooner than you would inside your aquarium. Statistically speaking you have many more devices in the rest of your house versus inside your aquarium. I'd guess and say 5 to 10 times more. Which means statistically you have a greater failure rate for a device outside your aquarium. You say aquarium equipment is more likely to fail, but what's that based on? I've never seen a study done on that, So I'm going to assume it as anecdotal evidence. I will stick with statistical probability for my home along with a grain of salt and common sense. It's not wrong for me to take that standpoint and doesn't mean it doesn't make any sense.
Your argument cites no statistics, but you claim it’s correct because I don’t have statistics either.
Let's apply basic logic:
Aquarium heaters, pumps, and cords run
submerged in warm, salty, high-pH water. They have a very high failure rate based on the environment and quality of materials. When they fail, they almost always energize the water you put your hands into.
On the other hand most household devices, have insulated cases, dry operating conditions, and any exposed metal is bonded to the electrical system.
The failure modes are not even remotely comparable.
But let's put this in context. Conductive cases on household appliances
must be bonded for safety. You are arguing
against bonding the aquarium (it is no different than a conductive case) because you incorrectly believe it is unsafe....
when the entire point of bonding is to make faults safe.
What I was trying to get across was that you stand to do more harm than good with a grounding probe because most people cannot guarantee that their home wiring is done 100% correctly. I've seen enough situations that have enough serious issues that it is not a chance I would every take in anyone else's home unless you verified every single electrical pathway.
Absolutely incorrect.
If the wiring is so compromised that a grounding probe is dangerous, then every bonded appliance in the house is already dangerous!!! Your refrigerators, washing machine, dishwashers, ranges, water heaters (and thus your faucets), furnace chassis, HVAC air handlers, and every grounded metal fixture in the home is dangerous because they are tied (bonded) to the same grounding system as the aquarium.
Are you advocating cutting the ground prongs off of all appliances? Of course not! Your aquarium is functionally the same as any appliance in a one line diagram. Either the part that you touch is insulated or not. If it is conductive, it should be bonded to ground. See how simple that is?
So when does this danger actually occur? Only in a very specific where the service neutral from the pole fails
and the service bond is missing. In that situation the entire grounding system in the house can float. That means that
every bonded appliance, your water pipes, and everything touching ground in your home becomes an acute shock hazard. That has nothing to do with the aquarium or a grounding probe! It means the entire electrical service is unsafe.
As long as you have a tested and functionally correct GFCI, a grounding probe will do absolutely nothing more in protecting you against electrical shock. (To add, this is where in my OPINION you only add potential for something bad to happen by adding a grounding probe.) The only thing that would help to protect you further is making sure you have an ARC fault panel. My opinion on grounding probes is formed around those points.
Absolutely incorrect.
If the aquarium is grounded and protected by a GFCI, a failing device will trip the GFCI before you ever make contact.
If the aquarium is not grounded, a GFCI will not trip until you become the fault path. You have to get shocked to clear the fault. That is the entire reason grounding exists.
