According to Rob :
You are right on everything when it pertains to new houses. The original
question was to do with older wiring which does not have a ground wire in
the circuit. In my case three months ago I was buying a property that has
older wiring. I was required to do an electrical inspection...

I appreciate all that.

I'll restate my point. Consider:

1) All new wiring (even in old houses) needs to be up to code. This _includes_
new repairs to old wiring. The code is quite clear on this point.

2) An inspector is perfectly free to exempt you from code specifics based upon
his judgement.

3) The inspector's primary goal is to make your building as safe as he can,
at the same time knowing you're not going to do a full rewire.

4) The inspector has seen your system, and therefore knows what will be safe
and what won't.

5) No-one else other than an inspector should be making these judgements
(as per passing a code inspection and other legal considerations).

He knows that grounding to your plumbing system will be an improvement,
despite the fact that both the NEC and CEC now frown on this.

But _you_ do not know that when you're making these recommendations to
others. In fact, grounding to a water pipe may make a bad situation worse.
You have no way of telling without seeing their plumbing.

The overall point is simple: in this newsgroup we should ONLY be
advising things that are code-legal (pass an inspection), unless we go
to the trouble of explaining how to determine whether the proposed
practise is safe, and letting them know how to make their own judgement
call.

Unadorned/unqualified advice to ground an outlet to a water pipe is
_very_ _very_ dangerous.

(1) Block the ground hole with epoxy to make the outlet into a 2 pin.

As I mentioned, this is illegal in US code, and I _suspect_ that it's
gone or about to go from ours. The old CEC recomendation was to use
caulk BTW. I'd be a little leery of some epoxies "flowing" into the
rest of the outlet and jamming the whole thing.

(3) Put in a GCFI.

The only safe recommendation without qualification/caveats.
--
Chris Lewis, Una confibula non set est
It's not just anyone who gets a Starship Cruiser class named after them.