On Monday, August 10, 2015 at 3:24:13 PM UTC-5, philo wrote:
On 08/10/2015 01:15 PM, wrote:
On Mon, 10 Aug 2015 08:52:04 -0700, "Edmund J. Burke"
wrote:

They didn't ground anything in 1932.

Not true at all, assuming they followed the code at the time.
Chapter 25 of the 1897 electrical code does not read that much
different than the 2014 when it comes to grounding conduit.

https://archive.org/stream/00701897/...e/n25/mode/2up




Glad you found that.

The problem with the 1932 conduit is that the grounds were high
resistance at best due to the now rusty and not terribly tight couplings.


I like to see less than half an ohm and most of the connections were
several ohms or non-existent.


With Romex, the ground wire is straight through and does not rely on the
pipe itself for a ground.

When I run conduit, I also pull a copper ground wire as well.

A lot of times I'll go into a building and see junctions completely
disconnected.

From your description of what you were cutting out, it appears to be ridged conduit. I can imagine that it's a fun job. If you think about the why of rigid conduit, pretend you were converting a home from gas lighting to electrical lighting back in the day, where would you install the wiring if not knob and tube? If I already had a pipe somewhere that was no longer being used for gas, I think I'd use it as a conduit for wire. Of course wiring practices evolved and changed as standards were published and inspections became the norm. I'd guess there were many house fires cause by the ignorance of that magical source of energy, electricity. That's probably the reason the rules and standards for electrical wiring were codified by the National Fire Protection Association which may have come into being for that reason. I don't know the history of the NFPA without reading about it because it may have been around since the days of gas lighting and the need for standards back then for installing gas lines in buildings. Since I haven really researched it, I'm just guessing. Now that I've become curious, I must vanish for a while and read up on the history of the organization, dammit! á•™(‡€€¸†¼€¶)á•—

[8~{} Uncle Code Monster