Attention Home Inspectors: The IEB Summer Mastermind is coming up on August 2nd. Details here: https://events.iebcoaching.com/IEBSummerMastermind2024#/
In this episode, Reuben and Tessa discuss repairing ungrounded three-prong outlets. They explain the importance of testing three-prong outlets and the dangers of ungrounded outlets. They discuss the different options for updating two-prong outlets and ungrounded three-prong outlets in older homes. They cover the importance of grounding, the use of metal conduits, and the limitations of using two-prong outlets or adapters. Overall, they provide valuable insights for home inspectors and homeowners dealing with outdated electrical systems.
Check out this link for the blog post related to three-prong outlets:
https://structuretech.com/options-for-repairing-ungrounded-three-prong-outlets/
Takeaways
Testing three-prong outlets is important to ensure they are properly grounded.
Ungrounded three-prong outlets can be dangerous and should be repaired.
There are different ways to fix ungrounded outlets, such as grounding the receptacle to a metal box or using GFCI protection.
Home inspectors should check a representative number of outlets to identify ungrounded outlets.
It is important to understand the basics of electrical grounding and the purpose of the third prong on a plug. Updating two-prong outlets or ungrounded three-prong outlets in older homes can be challenging.
Metal conduit provides a continuous path for grounding and is an ideal solution.
GFCI protection is an alternative option that does not require grounding.
AFCI protection is required for certain areas and should be considered when doing electrical work.
Bootleg grounds, where the neutral and ground are connected, can fool basic testers.
Specialized testers can detect bootleg grounds and provide more accurate results.
Chapters
00:00 Introduction and Holiday Recap
03:09 Partnership with IEB
08:12 The Importance of Testing Three-Prong Outlets
21:11 Common Questions and Misconceptions About Grounding Outlets
TRANSCRIPTION
The following is a transcription from an audio recording. Although the transcription is largely accurate, in some cases it may be slightly incomplete or contain minor inaccuracies due to inaudible passages or transcription errors.
Reuben Saltzman: Welcome to my house. Welcome to the Structure Talk podcast, a production of Structure Tech Home Inspections. My name is Reuben Saltzman, I’m your host alongside building science geek Tessa Murray. We help home inspectors up their game through education, and we help homeowners to be better stewards of their houses. We’ve been keeping it real on this podcast since 2019, and we are also the number one home inspection podcast in the world, according to my mom. Welcome back to the Structure Talk podcast. Tessa, how are you doing today?
Tessa Murray: Hey, I’m doing good, Reuben. Survived the 4th of July holiday, no injuries.
RS: Good.
TM: Yeah, everything was good. I saw some fireworks at a nearby location, actually a casino nearby.
RS: Oh, really?
TM: That shoots off fireworks every year, it has a really big display. It was my first time going, and there were tens of thousands of people there. It was crazy.
RS: Oh, wow.
TM: Yeah. They had a live band, a big concert. They had tons of food trucks. It was a whole big thing. And it was a well-oiled machine, how they directed traffic and had all these cars parking in this field. It was pretty impressive. I thought, man, this is gonna be a nightmare to get out.
RS: Yeah.
TM: But luckily, since we showed up kind of late, we parked in the back of this field, and as soon as the fireworks were over, we hopped in the car because we just watched them from the field.
RS: Yeah.
TM: And I cut through the field, and we were out of there in like two minutes.
RS: Oh, nice work. And was this in Red Wing?
TM: This was… Yeah, yeah. Outside of Red Wing. Treasure Island Resort and Casino.
RS: Sure.
TM: Yeah. So it was an impressive show. How about you?
RS: Yeah. It sounds like a lot of fun.
TM: Yeah. How was your 4th of July weekend?
RS: I hung out at the parents’ cabin, had tons of family up there, and we did all of the cabin stuff. Lots of time on the lake, the kids tubing, a bunch of people got up on the wakeboard, did a bunch of that, dirt bike riding, ATVs. We played a bunch of volleyball because my daughter is doing that now.
TM: Nice. That sounds fun.
RS: We had a good volleyball game going. Yeah. Yeah, it was fun. Yep. I spent a few days.
TM: How were the mosquitoes?
RS: During the day, they really weren’t bad until you got in the shade, and then it was smart to spray up. They were pretty ruthless at night.
TM: I was going to say, yeah, they’ve been really bad this season. And yeah, they’ve been relentless here in Red Wing.
RS: Yeah.
TM: All the rain we’ve had, it’s just terrible.
RS: All the rain. Yeah. I saw a picture today, someone posted a Valley Fair for anybody not around here, that’s our local amusement park. I think it’s owned by Six Flags now, or the Six Flags conglomerate. And they showed a huge section of it underwater. I couldn’t believe that.
TM: Yeah. I saw that, too. I know. Pretty wild. I think the park is still open, though, isn’t it? There’s a couple of rides that are underwater.
RS: Yeah, it’s gotta be.
TM: But the rest of the park is still functional. Yeah, I don’t know. Pretty wild. Pretty wild.
RS: Yeah. My daughter got a season pass there this year, and we have not gone once yet. So it was on my mind, and I was just looking it up, so how I found out about this. It’s like, we gotta start going there or this is not gonna be a good deal.
TM: Oh, my gosh. That’s how it always works. You buy the season pass and then you don’t go.
RS: And then you don’t go, yeah. All right. Well, before we get into today’s topic, I teased this on a couple of episodes back. And oh, by the way, speaking of a couple of episodes back, there was one episode, you and I did like two episodes ago where I just found out today that we screwed up the audio on it. This was one of those ones where we messed it up. Like Tessa’s audio for some reason, it didn’t record for the first ten minutes of the show. So we had to basically rerecord the show, and then as it turned out, it didn’t record for the very end of the show. So if you listen to that one about dishwashers and double traps and all that, and the audio was all screwed up at the end, sorry, that’s what we get for not relistening to our entire podcast before we air them. We didn’t know. Sorry, everyone.
TM: Maybe we should have some sort of quality control process in place Reuben, we appreciate our listeners.
RS: You know, we’re only ’60s and then Tess. Let’s not rush things.
TM: We appreciate our listeners. Thank you for letting us know.
RS: Yes, yes. And considering the amount of podcasts we do and how infrequently we come across that, it doesn’t happen too often.
TM: No big deal. Yeah.
RS: Okay. Something I had teased a while ago and was that we are now partners with IEB. IEB, Inspector Empire Builder, is the official sponsor of our podcast, and we’ve been… Structure Tech, I joined IEB back in 2019. It’s a group, kind of, I don’t even know how to describe it. You talk to people who run IEB, they don’t know how to describe it. My way would be, it’s a group that is designed to help home inspection companies do better. Whether it’s a one-person shop or a multi-inspector organization, whatever it is, it’s to help with systems and processes and be a more efficiently running organization. So, super excited to partner with them, and something I wanted to promote for them is that they’ve got their… We do these quarterly masterminds, and they used to all be in person way back in the early days. Now it has switched to every six months, it flip-flops. I believe it’s like quarter one and quarter three are on Zoom, virtual, and then quarters two and four are in person. So we’ve got the summer mastermind coming up online. And that is on August 2nd. It’s Friday, August 2nd, and it’s from…
RS: I believe it’s 08:00 a.m. To 05:00 p.m. There’s details online. We’ll put a link to that. But it’s always just a fantastic lineup, tons of fantastic information. I look forward to these events. I mean, you know, it’s a long day on Zoom, but it is a ton of content, and it’s a lot of stuff that you pick up. And Tessa, I wanted to share with you one of the speakers that you’re not gonna believe who this is. It’s a Minnesota guy who has nothing to do with home inspections. He has been a guest on our podcast a few times now, and he runs a home services company.
TM: Oh, Kura. Daniel Felt.
RS: Yes. Daniel Felt.
TM: Felt, yeah. Oh, wow.
RS: Daniel Felt of Kura is gonna be one of the featured speakers for the summer mastermind. How cool is that?
TM: Oh my gosh. Well, that’s amazing. He has really grown his business tremendously over the last few years, hasn’t he? So I’m sure he’s gonna be talking about expansion and growth and…
RS: Yeah. His topic is… It’s titled “From One-Time Deals to Lifetime Clients: Navigating the Path to Recurring Revenue in Home Services.”
TM: Oh, very interesting.
RS: Yeah.
TM: Cool.
RS: Yeah. So I’m really looking forward to him presenting. I’ll be a big cheerleader for him on that. And it’s not to takeaway from any of the other speakers, but this is just such a small-world local connection.
TM: It is.
RS: Like Daniel is on the IEB thing? Holy cow.
TM: Oh. I thought you were probably the one that connected him to IEB and recommended him as a speaker.
RS: No.
TM: No?
RS: No. I had nothing to do with it.
TM: Oh, my gosh.
RS: Yeah.
TM: Wow. That is… That’s wild. Well, good for him.
RS: Yes, it is.
TM: Yeah.
RS: Small world [0:08:20.7] ____.
TM: Very cool.
RS: So, excited for that. If you’re at all interested, you go to iebcoaching.com. You can go to events, and you can find all the details, and we will put a link to that in our show notes.
TM: Very nice. Wow. Okay. So, Reuben, what is the topic of the day today?
RS: All right. Today, kind of following along with the blog, this one is going to be on repairing ungrounded three-prong outlets. And I thought we’d talk a little bit more about how we test them, kind of what our procedure is for home inspectors, how we identify this problem, and what we say to our clients for different ages of houses, because it has got to be one of the most common electrical defects that home inspectors find on older homes is, you know, an ungrounded three-prong outlet. And so often people make a big deal about this, and oh, it’s going to be the end of the world. It’s going to be hideously expensive. It really doesn’t need to be that big of a deal. But I thought it would be helpful to just talk through the different ways that an electrician would fix this. And I’m being careful in my language because this is not intended to be a complete how-to guide. This is not a complete overview of the electrical code, but it helps for home inspectors to have a good understanding of the steps that an electrician would take to repair this condition. So… Oh, go ahead, Tess.
TM: Thank you for that disclosure Reuben. I’m shocked that you’re not gonna cover the entire electrical code in this 30-minute to 45-minute long podcast.
RS: No.
TM: Or all the details of how an electrician would handle this situation.
RS: No, that’s not the goal. Although I will say, from reading some of the posts on our Facebook page, there are some trolls out there who would expect us to do that. Say “You didn’t cover this section. You need more education.” Oh, shut up. Tessa… Okay. Tess, I gotta say. I had this electrician on there and he… Someone was asking, well, how do you put a screw in here? Blah, blah. You know what? Let’s get to it. I’ll get to it. We’ll cover it in the podcast here. But let’s start at square one. Testing three-prong outlets.
RS: So, most home inspectors carry around these cheap, little, basically disposable outlet testers. They cost about nine bucks, you stick them in the outlet, it has got three lights on there and it’ll tell you some very basic defects with the outlet. It will tell you if it’s properly wired and I do, air quotes, properly wired. It will tell you if it doesn’t have the ground wire connected. And on a three-prong outlet, it’s that bottom hole. It will tell you if it has… You know, I’m not gonna go in all the details, I’m boring people. It tells you about some basic defects. However, I will say, there are ways to fool these testers. There’s ways to cheat it. And I’ve never blogged about ways to cheat the system because I don’t want to make it easy for dishonest people, you know, like home flippers who just want to fool the home inspector. I don’t want to make it super easy for them to fool us.
TM: I think ethical output here, right?
RS: Yes, yes.
TM: We try.
RS: However, I think all of our listeners are people who are in this, they care about this, and they’re not the people who are trying to cheat the system. So we will talk about it on the podcast here.
TM: Yeah. Well, Reuben, can I ask you a question? Well, can I back up for a second? If anybody is listening and they’re like, “Why would you have an ungrounded three-prong outlet? What does that even mean, and why is that a problem?”
RS: Thank you, Tessa…
TM: We should talk about that.
RS: Yes. I appreciate you backing it up and covering the basics. Thank you. So on any given receptacle, you’re going to have at least two prongs. And we always call it the hot and the neutral, the technical terms for these would be the grounded and the ungrounded conductors. That’s the way I was taught to think of them. But basically, the electricity flows back and forth between the two. One of these conductors gets connected to the earth, and it means that if you’re in contact with the earth and you touch that one, you’re all at the same potential and nothing could happen to you. But if you touch the other one, you could get shocked. That’s kind of what it comes down to. And if what we’re calling the hot, the ungrounded conductor were to come into contact with something metallic, and that metallic thing isn’t touching anything else, it just silently energizes it. And think about…
TM: So dangerous.
RS: Yeah, it’s dangerous. I mean, think about using maybe an old hand drill with a metallic case on it, and then the wire going to your drill shorts out with the case of the drill. Now, you have silently energized it. So if you pick up that drill and you’re in contact with the earth, you complete the circuit, and you get a nasty shock just by touching the metal. Now, to prevent that, whenever you’ve got stuff with a metallic frame, and I’m oversimplifying it, but there’s a lot of different electronic stuff where it’s not simply a two-prong plug, like a desk lamp, you have a three-prong plug where that third prong is grounding the equipment. And it means that it provides a very good path back to the earth. So if something did short out with the housing of your equipment, it’s gonna provide such a good path back to the circuit that it actually trips your circuit breaker. Essentially, it’s gonna keep you from getting electrocuted. And so…
TM: So let me clarify, when you say back to the earth, that electricity is actually going back to the main panel, tripping the circuit breaker, and then going to the earth through the grounding system?
RS: Yeah. You know, I’d have to really think that one through. I think at this point, it’s not even gonna go back to the earth. It’s just gonna go back to the panel.
TM: Yeah. Okay. Okay.
RS: But bottom line is, under normal circumstances, for most equipment, they’re not gonna do anything with that ground. It’s just kind of there. The way I describe it as, it’s like an emergency lane on a highway. Normally, there’s nothing going to it. But if you do need it, it’s very important to have it. So anything you plug in is still gonna work, whether it’s grounded or not. It just might not be as safe.
TM: Right.
RS: That’s what it comes down to.
TM: And the reason that we might see three-prong outlets that are actually not grounded, where they would fool you if you look at it because you’d assume it’s grounded. It looks like it’s a three-prong outlet, shouldn’t it be? But it’s not. We see that all the time. And it’s typically not a wiring issue for a newer home. It’s because it’s an older house that has older wiring that didn’t have a ground wire. And someone has at some point updated that outlet, and they’ve put in a grounded outlet, but they didn’t actually make sure that there was a grounded pathway back to the main panel when they did, correct?
RS: Precisely. Yes. You got it. Like you had knob and tube wiring, that’s a two-wire system, and there is no pathway back to the panel. Well, maybe not. Maybe there is, maybe there isn’t, but we’re going to assume that there isn’t. Or if there is, they didn’t use it and they just connected the hot and the neutral, and then they plugged in their device and they said, “Oh, it still works. Good. Who needs that extra prong?” Right?
TM: Yeah. And I don’t know about other regions in the country, but I know here in kind of the Twin Cities area, I mean, you can be in a house that was built in the ’60s, and it can have a lot of two-prong outlets. And if it has been remodeled, it’s important to make sure those three-prong outlets are actually grounded.
RS: Yes.
TM: But yeah, up until, I don’t know. Would you say there’s a cutoff date, Reuben, of when, you know, most houses had, I guess, Romex installed, or had grounded outlets? I’m putting you on the spot here. I don’t expect you to know the answer off the top of your head, but you probably do.
RS: Well, yeah, the NEC changed in 1962. They said that basically you need to have a grounding path to all of the receptacles. Before then, there was different areas where they said, “All right, these always need to be grounded.” Areas like in kitchens…
TM: Kitchens.
RS: And laundry areas, I think bathrooms. There’s a bunch of areas where they said, “You always have to have a ground path here.” But at some point, they said all of them need to have a ground path. So pre-1960s, you may or may not have it. And those are the ones we’re most concerned with making sure that they’re properly grounded. I mean, we check them all either way, but that’s where I should say we expect to find them not grounded.
TM: Yeah. And let me just say, not every inspector out there is going to be checking every single outlet.
RS: No, the home inspection standards of practice say that you need to check a representative number of outlets. And by the way, we’re using the terms outlet and receptacle interchangeably. The technical name for this is receptacle. But when we say outlet, we’re referring to a receptacle for the purposes of this post. But yeah, home inspection standards of practice say you need to check one in every room. That’s a representative number. And I can… I can tell you there are a lot of home inspectors where that’s exactly what they do, they check one, not us.
TM: You can miss a lot of things, potentially.
RS: Yeah. Yeah. We’re checking everyone that we can possibly get to, that is our standard company operating procedure.
TM: Yeah. Okay. So getting back on track, what do you do when you do find these outlets that look like they should be grounded? They’re three-pronged, but they’re not. Are there different ways to fix them?
RS: Yeah. There’s a few different ways. Now, the best way and the way that the electrical code requires you to do it, they say that if there is a ground path, you need to use it, and it might mean you’ve got metal conduit, like flexible conduit or rigid metallic conduit. If you’ve got a metal pathway going all the way back to the panel, then all you need to do is ground your receptacle to the metal box, assuming that the metal box has a continuous metal pathway. And to do that, it’s a matter of simply running a wire from your receptacle to the box itself. And basically, you’re done. And you would need to have an electrician verify that. They would verify that there is a continuous metal pathway. And you know what, Tessa? That’s where I’ll bring this up. I had talked about that, and I showed some pictures of it, and I think I even had a video on my YouTube channel showing how you would take a screw and put it into the hole and run a ground wire to it. And I had somebody on the Facebook page say, “Well, what if I can’t get at the backside of this hole and the hole isn’t threaded? How do I get one of these screws in there to put a nut on the backside?” And I said, “Use a self-tapping screw.”
RS: And it’s these green ground screws, and they got a little cut on the threads, and they’re slightly tapered, so that when you start turning it in, it’ll actually thread itself in there. It’ll cut threads.
TM: Great tip. Yeah. And very detailed. I’m impressed that you’re responding to these very specific questions. How do you have time to do this, Reuben?
RS: You know what? I’ll admit it, I don’t respond to all of them, but it was like, all right, this is easy. I’ve worked at a hardware store for a million years, and we know about self-tapping screws and all that.
TM: A little tips and tricks. Yeah.
RS: And I had this electrician come on. He said, “That’s not self-tapping. That’s a self-threading screw.” And I’m just like, “what are you doing? Are you kidding me?” I’ve never even heard the term self threading. The term is self-tapping. And perhaps he was confusing this with a self drilling screw because it’s not a self drilling screw. It’s not going to drill a hole in the metal. It’s flat, it’s blunt tipped. But I didn’t engage. I think I…
TM: It’s probably wise, someone who takes the time to correct a detail like that on a post like that has too much time on their hands.
RS: I think so. I think so. All right. That’s as much as I’m going to say about that, but that’s… Okay. Total tangent. But the point is, if you have a continuous mental path, you need to do it. You need to use it. One way that you can kind of sort of figure out if you have a continuous path is you take one of those simple two-lead testers. It’s like you take one lead, you stick it in the hot slot, you take another, you stick it in the neutral, and it lights up your tester. If you have a continuous path, you can probably stick one slot or stick one lead into the hot slot on your outlet, and you just touch the metal box, and if it lights up, you got some type of path to ground.
TM: Now, can you do that by sticking one lead of that two-lead tester into the hot and then touching the other lead to the actual, like screwdriver in the front of the outlet cover so you don’t have to take the whole cover off and touch the metal box. Can you, as a home inspector, can you do it quickly without removing the cover?
RS: I think you would need to remove the cover plate to be sure because those screws are not reliable. The screws might be painted, it might not give you a good…
TM: Reading?
RS: Surface. So I would at least take the cover off. Yeah.
TM: So the best way of doing it is actually taking the cover off and having one lead of the tester touching that metal box?
RS: That’s how I do it, for sure.
TM: Okay.
RS: And I will say, though, you can get false positives doing it that way. I mean, if you’ve got a box that’s installed in a concrete block wall, that will fool your tester, and it’ll tell you that it, you have a continuous metal path because concrete is a great conductor, but it’s not a continuous metal path. So it’s iffy to do this. And you shouldn’t, a home inspector shouldn’t do that test and tell people, yeah, you do have a continuous path, but if you do that test and it doesn’t light up, you can be pretty sure that you don’t have a continuous path.
TM: Okay. Yeah.
RS: If it lights up you can say you might have a path.
TM: Yeah. It’s not definitive if it lights up. It’s just a guess.
RS: Exactly. Exactly. So that’s one way to fix it. But the electrical code does give you a few different other options. One of them, they will allow you to go back to a two-prong outlet, which…
TM: What? What?
RS: I think it’s stupid. I know, right?
TM: That’s crazy.
RS: You can install a two-prong outlet and then, of course, what’s somebody gonna do as soon as they need a three-prong plug?
TM: Get an adapter.
RS: You get an adapter, one of those 79 cents adapters, and then you think that you are doing something safe. But the only way those adapters can be safely used is if you ground the adapter. And you would do that by removing the cover plate screw, the screw that you’re talking about. And then you would put a new screw in there that connects to a two-prong… Or that connects to your two-prong plug and your two-prong plug is grounded. Yeah. You got to wrap your head around that. It’s not a grounding outlet, but it’s grounded.
TM: Okay. How many two-prong outlets are actually grounded, though?
RS: None of them.
TM: Okay. All right. That’s what I thought.
RS: Yeah. I mean, it could happen.
TM: So that’s never gonna happen? You’re never gonna really be able to screw an adapter into a two-prong outlet and have it be grounded?
RS: No. So I think it’s a horrible option. And not only that, but I do got to say there’s all these little exceptions in the electrical code. They say that you can do this. However, you need to check out section 250.114 of the code. And they say that there’s a bunch of locations where, if you’re plugging stuff in, it does need to be grounded, no matter what. You can’t use a two-prong receptacle. And for residential, they say it’s gonna apply to, I’ll just list a few of them, I’m not gonna list them all, but a few of them would be if you’re plugging in a refrigerator, a freezer, an ice maker, an air conditioner, a washing machine, a clothes dryer, a dishwasher, a range, a disposer, a sump pump, if you’re plugging in any of this stuff, it needs to be going into a properly grounded three-prong outlet. You can’t go back to a two-prong outlet in any of these locations. So, there’s always exceptions. And then there’s a bunch more that are just really out there that we never see during home inspections.
TM: Okay. Okay.
RS: So, got to read the code.
TM: So, is there a third option then? Besides, you know…
RS: Yes.
TM: Trying to ground it? If you’ve got metal conduit that connects all the way back to the main panel ground path, that’s a pretty easy one. But if it’s a two-prong outlet and you don’t wanna just go back to a two-prong outlet. What’s the other option?
RS: The last one is to make it GFCI-protected. And GFCI, it stands for Ground Fault Circuit Interrupter. It’s those outlets you’ve been seeing in bathrooms and kitchens and all that for about 50 years now is how long they’ve been out. And they’ve got two buttons. There’s a test button and a reset button. And their job is to keep you from getting electrocuted, that’s it, that’s what they do.
TM: We like that.
RS: Yeah, we like that. They will sense when the current going back and forth is not exactly equal. And if there’s a difference between those two, they say, okay, there’s a leak, somebody is getting electricity going somewhere it shouldn’t, and it shuts the current off, those things do not need to be grounded to operate properly. So they let you use those in locations where you don’t have a three-prong outlet, with the, you know, of course, with the exceptions that I listed above. And you need to put a little sticker on the outlet that says, “no equipment ground.” It’s this little blue sticker. It comes in the package of every GFCI outlet you buy. And you put that little sticker on the outlet, and it says, “no equipment ground.” And now it lets people know that it’s not grounded. How does that sound?
TM: You know, I can believe it, but I think I’ve seen that maybe two houses out of a thousand.
RS: Yeah. It never gets done. Yeah, nobody puts those on.
TM: You know, what about a house that maybe doesn’t have metal conduit for the electrical wiring in the house? Like, let’s say they don’t have… Maybe they’ve got just cloth-wire or knob-and-tube going to these outlets. Even if you try and ground the receptacle to the metal box, you won’t have a metal pathway back to the main panel without that conduit. And if you don’t wanna go back to a two-prong outlet or you don’t wanna install a GFCI, you actually want a grounded outlet. Is the solution to actually run new wiring?
RS: Yeah. Yeah, you’d have to have an electrician run a ground path all the way back to the panel. Correct. Now I have seen…
TM: Would they run just a ground path or put in like new wiring, like Romex?
RS: I would think that they would put in Romex. I mean, you could run an individual ground wire back to the panel, but I don’t know how you would safely do that and have it protected for the whole path. I don’t even wanna get into…
TM: It just seems dangerous.
RS: Describing how that would be done, I don’t know.
TM: Yeah. I’m just thinking like a house with knob-and-tube, there’s no metal conduit, and you’re not gonna run this copper wire all the way back to the panel along the old knob and tube. So, you’re probably, in that situation, if you want a properly grounded three-prong outlet, you’re just running new wire.
RS: I would assume so. I mean, if you’re gonna go to all the work of running something back to the panel, why would you leave the original knob and tube wiring that insurance companies already hate?
TM: You’re right.
RS: I’m sure you’d just rewire it. Although, I will say, I’ve been in houses where they kind of have what I almost like to call bootleg ground. It was legal at some point to run a ground wire, just an individual wire to a nearby steel water pipe, and it would provide a ground path. For some time that was legal, you can’t do it that way anymore though, because now we got all these plastic pipes and who knows what a plumber is gonna do.
TM: Yeah. Yeah. And as the old steel ages out, people are replacing it. Then you lose your ground path. Yeah.
RS: Yeah.
TM: Very unreliable. So it seems like this, if you wanna update a two-prong outlet or you’ve got an ungrounded three-prong outlet, best-case scenario, you’ve got wiring that runs through metal conduit, you’ve got a metal box, and you’ve got a continuous path all the way back to the panel. Worst-case scenario, you maybe have cloth wiring. You don’t have a continuous path back to the panel, and you might have to install new wiring.
RS: Yeah, yeah. That’s the worst case. The more likely case is that you’re gonna add GFCI protection, and, you know, I didn’t cover it. But a couple of ways to do it. One would be to install the GFCI receptacle right at the outlet. Another would be to install a GFCI receptacle upstream of the outlet. It could be… You could have one GFCI protecting a whole string of outlets downstream from it. You could install a GFCI outlet right by the main panel. You could even replace the circuit breaker. Assuming it’s a more modern box, you could replace the circuit breaker with the GFCI circuit breaker. So, a bunch of ways to add GFCI protection.
TM: Yeah. You know, I kind of wonder if you are trying to install GFCI breakers on a lot of circuits and, you know, at what point does it just make sense to just upgrade the whole panel so you can have arc fault and GFCI protection for everything you should?
RS: I think it’s a great fix. And, you know, to make it even more complicated, Tess, at the very end of my blog post on this topic, I say, “and now to make it more complicated,” as of January 1st 2014, basically, if you’re doing electrical work in the house, if you’re replacing an outlet, replacing wiring, whatever, if it’s in a location that requires AFCI protection, that’s arc fault protection, which is designed to prevent fires. If you’re working in an area that needs that protection, you need to add that protection when you do the work. So you don’t need to install AFCI breakers when you’re just replacing a panel. But if you’re doing work on the wiring downstream from that panel, any of the work that you’re touching needs that newer protection. So if you’re replacing an outlet, you know, technically you need to add that AFCI protection. And if you’ve got an older panel, like a fuse panel, or an obsolete panel where they don’t make AFCI breakers for that, how are you gonna do it? Now it’s really time to think about replacing that whole panel for sure.
TM: You can see how this could get really expensive if you have an electrician come out and you’ve got, let’s just say like three bedrooms that you want to upgrade a two-prong outlet to a three-prong outlet, now all of a sudden you’ve got the permit cost, you’ve got the labor costs, and then potentially costs of all these new arc fault breakers too. It just adds up quickly.
RS: But I will say that we’re talking about the letter of the code, and I think there’s a lot of electricians out there who don’t take it that seriously. I mean, we already know. We’ve talked about this on our podcast. We had Mike Twitty on and he was talking about how so many electricians will just remove AFCI breakers that continually trip and they’ll put in regular breakers, and he’s kind of shrugging, going what are you supposed to do? I mean, people need to live in their houses.
TM: Right. Wow. Well, you know, I think this is a tricky topic I think, and I know you’ve blogged on it several times, but I think it’s good just to kind of talk through all these different potential options for people if they have this situation in their house or if you are a home inspector what this means, and hopefully you can better explain the fix for whatever client you’re working with, help them understand it better.
RS: Yes. And you know what? The one other thing I wanted to cover was how somebody might trick those cheap little testers that we talked about at the beginning.
TM: Wait, you can trick them?
RS: You can trick them. And that’s the other term we call a bootleg ground, is where somebody just runs a short length of wire between the neutral and the hot on an outlet. All you do is you connect those two together, and now it’s gonna fool your three-prong tester, and it’s gonna tell the home inspector that it’s grounded.
TM: How as a home inspector would you sniff that out?
RS: You know, I would say most of the time you probably wouldn’t, but that’s most of the time. We’ve sniffed out a number of them doing home inspections where, let’s say we are on the third floor, second floor of an old Minneapolis house built in 1900. We know it has got knob and tube wiring, but we’re testing that the outlets are properly grounded. Sometimes that’ll happen to us, and we just get curious and we go, how is this grounded? All I can see is knob and tube wiring. What’s going on? And we’ll pull the cover plate off. And there it is. You can see the wire connected from the neutral to the ground. And it’s just about a home inspector being curious.
TM: Oh, man.
RS: And looking at the big picture, thinking about what’s going on, that’s one way. It’s just being aware of their surroundings and being very curious. The other is you can use a fancy electrical tester. There’s one, I think it’s called a sure test. I don’t remember off the top of my head, I own one, and it’s expensive. They cost a few hundred bucks.
TM: Gosh.
RS: And it’s not this tiny little thing that you hold in your hand. It’s kind of like more of a computer. It’s about the size of a cell phone, but it’s a lot thicker. And it has got this cord attached to it. And you plug it in and it’ll measure all this stuff. I mean, it’ll tell you the voltage, it’ll tell you the voltage drop, and it’ll also tell you if it detects a bootleg ground. And if I remember correctly, it does that by measuring the resistance from the neutral back to the panel and the ground back to the panel. And if there’s basically no resistance between the neutral and the ground, it means that you have a very short wire connecting the two.
TM: Yeah.
RS: And it’ll identify that as a bootleg ground.
TM: Wow.
RS: Now, I used one of those for probably two years straight back in my early home inspection days. And I would use it at every old house, at every outlet, and I didn’t find a single bootleg ground in that entire time with all this hassle I was spending with this clunky outlet.
TM: Well, that’s encouraging.
RS: Yeah. And after that, I just said, what am I doing? This investment of my time is not finding anything. I was so excited, for the first time, I was going to find it. I never found a single bootleg ground, and I gave up on doing that.
TM: I was gonna say I don’t think I’ve seen any inspector on the Structure Tech team use one of those.
RS: No.
TM: Fancy testers. So I was gonna ask you, who owns those things? I mean, do electricians use them?
RS: I’m not sure.
TM: Typically? Who I mean…
RS: I don’t know who uses them.
TM: Because it’s kind of above the pay grade for a home inspector, I think to carry around one of those.
RS: I think it is. I think it is. Yeah. I don’t know any home inspectors who regularly use those.
TM: Except for you.
RS: I mean, I know people do. That’s how I heard about it. But I don’t. Not a fan.
TM: Now one day that your spidey senses went off and you pulled the cover plate off and you pulled the outlet out and you looked at it and you’ve discovered the bootleg ground. What did you do?
RS: I went, Eureka.
[laughter]
RS: But although I didn’t share it. It’s like, we don’t share those photos on social media because I don’t want to teach unscrupulous people how to fool the tester.
TM: How to do it.
RS: So it’s just something that we basically don’t talk about.
TM: Reuben, I doubt that the unscrupulous people are listening to this podcast or reading your blogs.
RS: Well, the blog, maybe. I mean, you know, you could. Maybe you do a Google search, how to fool a three-prong tester, and somebody else will probably have it up, but I’m not going to put it up. I think it’s better to just not have that information up. But we could talk about it here, just for the purposes of making home inspectors better home inspectors, trying to make them a little bit more curious about this stuff.
TM: Yeah, yeah. I think, you know, that’s what makes a good home inspector, is that you can kind of put the pieces together and take a step back every once in a while to just, “Okay, I’m in this older house, knob and tube wiring and everything is telling me it’s grounded. Is it?”
RS: Yeah. Is it really? And how did they do it? What the heck is going on here?
TM: Yeah. Yeah. Okay, well, good info again, Reuben, thank you so much for covering just the big picture. But you also, I would say, gave a lot of detail in this podcast. Although it may not be enough detail for some. We can’t make everyone happy, can we?
RS: Well, thanks for keeping me on track and asking the good questions that I just don’t even think to cover. I appreciate you keeping me on track, Tess.
TM: Hey, I love doing these podcasts with you. And you know what, Reuben? You’re like, I’ve said this before, but you’re like a walking encyclopedia. So happy to keep you on track whenever I can.
RS: I appreciate it. All right, well, Tess, great to see you.
TM: Good to see you too.
RS: And I hope you’re enjoying your summer.
TM: Thank you. You too. And if people want to get a hold of us or they wanna complain about how we’re not getting detailed enough, how do they reach us?
RS: Podcast.
TM: Besides putting tacky comments on our posts.
RS: Yeah, just troll our Facebook page. That’s the best way. No, please email us at podcast@structuretech.com.
TM: Great. And you’ll put links, maybe to the different video blogs you have of everything you described today for learners visual learners?
RS: I’ll put a link to the pod or to the blog post, and that has got the video embedded in there, so, yeah, I’ll show that too.
TM: Perfect. Perfect.
RS: All right.
TM: All right. Well, thanks, Reuben. Good to see you.
RS: Thanks, Tess. Good to see you, too. Thanks for everyone listening. We’ll catch you next week. Take care.