Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by peteey 3053 days ago
Ground is literally the ground. The Earth makes a good return path. The hot wire is going positive and negative relative to the land you stand on.
1 comments

This isn't true in your home. The neutral is bonded to ground at a single point, in the main panel of your house. Current essentially all returns on the neutral to secondary of the pole xformer. The Earth is much higher impedance than the path back to the pole. Even during a ground fault event the current returns on the ground (technically EGC) to the bond point in the panel, and then from there back to the secondary of the utility pole.

Grounding to earth itself mainly serves to hold the potential of your house near that of the pole.