"Bruce L. Bergman" wrote in message
...
On Wed, 28 Jul 2004 15:06:48 -0700, "Randy H."
wrote:

If you run your wire thru conduit, that is your ground leg. Your breaker
box
and all is grounded to the ground rod. You should only need to four wires
in
the conduit.

Please note I am not an electrician. But I done a lot of my own wiring.
(no
fires yet!)

Randy

Don't worry, with that attitude you'll have your big fire any day
now. :-/

Using the conduit as the sole source of ground has not been legal
under NEC for many years - but it /used/ to be legal (since they
didn't really worry about branch circuit grounding at all), so many
people assume it still is. We've since learned that conduit joints
get loose or sprung (and breaks the ground circuit) and nobody sees it
or fixes it.

All power circuits that you run or re-run now should have a green
safety ground wire run along with the power wires - if you are
changing a section of wire in the middle of an old conduit run, bond
your new ground wire to the boxes at each end, using a self-drilling
sheet metal screw if the box doesn't have provisions for a grounding
screw. And leave a pigtail of spare ground wire so you can connect to
it when you rewire the circuit further.

If you take the green wire back to the main panel where the neutral
and safety ground are bonded together, you can connect ground wires to
a vacant hole on the Main neutral bar. If it is a sub-panel, you
can't - you need to bond to the can, or add a separate grounding bar.

You can use a reduced gauge ground wire as compared to the power
wires (like a #12 ground wire with #10 or #8 circuit wires) but it
still has to be large enough to trip the breaker or blow the fuse on a
ground fault without melting in the process.

-- Bruce --
--
Bruce L. Bergman, Woodland Hills (Los Angeles) CA - Desktop
Electrician for Westend Electric - CA726700
5737 Kanan Rd. #359, Agoura CA 91301 (818) 889-9545
Spamtrapped address: Remove the python and the invalid, and use a net.

I agree with the practice of running an equipment grounding conductor in the
conduit for the same reasons you mention, but could you please cite the code
article which prohibits the use of a conduit system as the sole equipment
grounding conductor?