On Mar 24, 8:19*pm, "Robert Green" wrote:
"Nate Nagel" wrote in message

...

stuff snipped

Both the inspector that did the inspection before I bought my house and
the one that did it for the eventual buyers said that they weren't
*allowed* to do so. *State law, or just some kind of organization thing?
* I don't know.

I really wish the first guy would have done so however, I would have
negotiated down when I saw that the "updated wiring" was an illegal hack
job.

I'm just glad the kid that installed all the grounded outlets with no ground
in the house I bought wasn't smart enough to figure out that he could fool
the tester by tying the ground socket to the neutral. *It would be really
nice if someone developed a plug-in tester that could catch that. *There has
to be a measurable difference between a real ground going to the socket and
a pigtailed neutral that's detectable at the outlet.

I doubt your seller was the first SOB to pull that trick and he won't be the
last. *There are millions of houses that still have ungrounded wiring. *I
have a new tester with a GFCI function. *If I get a minute, I might wire up
an outlet to see what the tester reveals and what I can determine with my
digital meter. *A real ground connection should have a lot more capacitance
that a pigtailed neutral.

I've asked to pull switch covers (three wallswitch boxes with blank covers
was too much mystery for me to stand) before and people really, really balk.
I can see their point. *You could damage something accidentally - and
perhaps in the mind of a paranoid seller purposely and use it to negotiate a
lower price. *The inspector we hired wouldn't remove the cover of the
circuit panel either but pointed out that some serious hack work was visible
entering the box from the side. *The ungrounded grounded outlets were enough
to knock a few thousand off the purchase price.

--
Bobby G.

There should be some measureable finite resistance between the neutral
and ground terminals of a correctly wired outlet, and virtually no
resistance between the neutral and ground if they are tied together at
the outlet itself. I don't know what those numbers are as I have
never had to actually measure this.