General > General Technical Chat
How to ground equipment in a house with no grounded receptacles?
jpanhalt:
Hi Marks, I have dealt with old houses in the US. How old is the house? Knob and tube wiring? Does it have a basement?
Some owners opt for total rewiring, which can be more or less difficult depending on how the house was built and whether a subsequent owner has had in wall foam insulation added.
As for simply grounding a single room, I have used a single, heavy gauge copper wire (e.g., 8 or 10 awg) run around the baseboard. Then, it was easy to use clamps on that wire with pigtails up to the wall sockets. That way, there were no interruptions in the safety ground. If cosmetics matter, the baseboard wire can be run behind the baseboard and the pigtails behind the plaster (?) to the outlet.
As for grounding to a cold water pipe, that used to be standard practice, but fell into disfavor. I 've not checked current code, but doing that was still allowed several years ago. You need to ensure there are no breaks from the service entrance to the pipe you are attaching. Inline water meters are a potential break, but in household systems, there is usually a hefty bar between between the incoming and outgoing pipes. It is easy to check those things, if the house has a basement.
Also, with the proliferation of plastic, you need to ensure the incoming supply is adequately grounded. For example, my current home was built in 1993 in a rural area far from the highway. Plastic goes all the way from the highway valve/meter to where the pipe penetrates the basement wall. That is, although the house is full of copper pipe, the incoming line is not grounded per se. My other home in the city was built in 1950, has a basement, and was easy to add grounding based on the water system that is all soldered copper.
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