Scherer Electric Blog: Posts Tagged ‘Grounding’

What Does It Mean to “Ground” Your Home?

Monday, July 3rd, 2023
electrical-parts

No, you’re not telling your home that it can’t leave the house for the next two weeks … which is both redundant and ridiculous. Obviously, “grounding” a house means something else. If you’ve heard that it’s important to have home grounding, you might have wondered 1) what exactly that means, and 2) if your home is already grounded or not.

We offer home grounding services and many other residential electrical services in Orchard Park, NY and throughout Western New York. 

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The Importance of Properly Grounding Your Home

Monday, January 3rd, 2022
GFCI outlet

When we as electricians say a home is grounded, we mean that there’s a connection between the electrical components of the structure and the ground. Electricity naturally seeks the shortest path to the earth that it can, and when a house is grounded it provides electricity with the best path down into the ground and not into parts of the house where it can cause damage.

If you have three-prong outlets in your house, it means the house is grounded. The third circular hole in the outlet is to ground the outlet. 

Unfortunately, not all homes in this area are grounded. If you live in a house that doesn’t have three-prong outlets, we recommend calling our electricians for home grounding services in Buffalo, NY. And no, using three-prong adapters isn’t “grounding” the house. But even grounded homes can run into problems if they are improperly grounded. 

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Does My Home Need Grounding Services?

Monday, June 22nd, 2020
electrical-outlet-wall

What does it mean to have your house grounded? We could go into some lengthy engineering explanations about how electricity works, but we can provide a simpler discussion of the electrical flow in your house. Electricity is always trying to “ground,” which means it gets rid of all its negative energy so it can get back to being balanced. In your home, the way the electrical systems allow electricity to return to ground is through the neutral wires. The “hot” wires carry the negative half of the polarized charge of electricity, and the neutral wires contain the positive half. These wires run next to each other through your electrical system.

For an example of this standard grounding at work, look at an outlet. One slot is the “hot” side, and the other is the “neutral.” The current flows through the hot side and then into the neutral side to eliminate the negative energy.

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