Doug Miller wrote:
In article . com, wrote:
But the ground is meant to protect against a short to the 'case', so if
a short happens, the ground will not be protected by the circuit
breaker---it will overheat.
The breaker will trip long before the wire will melt.
--
Regards,
Doug Miller (alphageek at milmac dot com)
It's time to throw all their damned tea in the harbor again.
Again, Thanks for the input. To clarify what I should have written, my
plan was to tie my new cable into a ground bussbar which will be
secured to the metal of the subpanel. The current neutral bar either
floats or is grounded depending on one screw which makes the ground
connection. I will remove that to make it float. Regarding the guage
and being seperate from the supply, well sometimes something is better
than nothing. 3 #12 conductors all tied to the main panel ground bus
and to the sub panel ground bus is better than the current situation.
Each #12 conductor is good for 20 Amps, so in theory my ground wire(s)
can carry 60A combined, and it is only a 40A breaker. A lesser evil
than the current situation which has not been problematic so far
anyway. When I shop for the bussbar I will price a length of #4 bare
copper and consider running that to the main instead. The issue then
will be finding a lug in the main large enough to bond it to.
Regards,
Joe