"Chris McBrien" wrote in message
. ..
These days the bonding of water pipes is only to prevent the build up of
static electricity as you can have plastic, non conducting, fittings in
between pipes. The Earthing is not actually used as a Safety Earth in this
case.


So protection against indirect contact isn't the reason anymore then?

S'funny I always thought the idea was to provide a low resistance path for
current to flow resulting in the fuse or circuit breaker operating and
disconnecting fault from the supply especially in cases where the house
pipework is copper and the underground supply is in non conductive plastic.
Perhaps you know differently?