Ungrounded 3-Prong Receptacles Question

Submitted by speedyspaghetti t3_10q52ii in DIY

Hey everyone -

So I figured that the recent flooding in my house due to the California storms was a good excuse to get some minor items done while I was doing the big restoration.

One bedroom in my house has 2-prong receptacles, which I figured I would just replace with GFCI outlets to safely ground them. However, while I was working on the adjacent room, I decided to replace the ivory colored outlets with nicer white ones. When I plugged in my tester to each outlet, I noticed that all of the 4 3-prong outlets had an open ground. I turned off the power, pulled off the plate and outlet, and found that there in fact is a ground wire running through the box, but it is not connected to the outlet. The ground wire, however, runs through the box (meaning, it runs in from one box and to another one, it is a continuous piece) and is not cut in a way that I could easily connect it to the outlet.

The wire seems rather thin, much more so than the other ground wires in my house, so I'm guessing this is an older style of Romex? I believe it is 16 gauge.

Would it be safe to cut the existing ground wire, make a pigtail with another piece of ground wire using a Wago or twist cap, and then connecting that to the outlet? If so, would it be ok to use 14 gauge wire for the last bit of pigtail (where it connects to the outlet) since I don't have any 16 gauge on hand, but I do have some 14/2 Romex.

Thank you!

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KingstenHd t1_j6nvpmt wrote

Keep in mind when working after someone else that especially when mistakes are made that they may have never grounded it all the way back to the main panel or any sub panels.

Yes what you are saying is fine and safe if they didn't do some weird ass backwards other things. If all they did was skip grounding the outlets then pigtailing it will work perfectly fine as well as going to a larger wire size is fine.

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speedyspaghetti OP t1_j6nwl0k wrote

Thanks for the quick response.

So, if I were to do this, and the outlet tester were to indicate a correctly grounded outlet, does that rule out the possibility that it was not grounded at the panel? Or, does the tester only detect whether the ground wire is connected to the outlet, and thus not if it is truly grounded? If the latter is the case, how would I go about verifying that it is in fact grounded?

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KingstenHd t1_j6nx6pg wrote

It will tell you if it's grounded to the panel or I very least to a ground rod. Which is where you want to be grounded anyways..

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speedyspaghetti OP t1_j6nxrse wrote

So as long as the outlets show grounded on my plug-in tester after doing what I suggested above, I'm good?

I'll probably just pull off the cover on all the outlets in those two rooms to ensure that nothing else janky was done.

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KingstenHd t1_j6ny94z wrote

Correct, you'll be good. Sorry I use speech to text and I'm I'm running around trying to answer lol. Best of luck to you.

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speedyspaghetti OP t1_j6or6xm wrote

Lol no worries - speech to text is always a shot in the dark for me. Thank you so much!

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marigolds6 t1_j6os2f2 wrote

To really be certain, it would be a good idea to get a multimeter and verify that you are getting the correct voltage when testing between hot and ground (should be the same as testing between hot and neutral). You can do this carefully with the bare wire in the box before cutting it. But be careful, as you would be reaching into the back of the potentially live box with a probe while the circuit is energized!! (Highly recommend safety gloves if you do this.)

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Remanage t1_j6pjhn5 wrote

Technically it might also show grounded if it's touching a metal box that also is metal all the way back to the panel, or if it's tied into a neutral prior to getting back to the panel.

I would personally stick with the plan of making the first outlet in the circuit a GFCI. You can still tie into the wire that may be ground, and if it's wrong, the GFCI will still attempt to protect you.

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Synaps4 t1_j6nv0as wrote

A detailed enough question you might post it to r/AskElectricians/

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