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by I moved into an older house (built in 1955) and had to change the outlet for my electric dryer (built in 2005). Both the old and new outlets had four prongs, but they were arranged differently. After removing it from the wall, I noticed the old outlet only had three wires connected to it (no ground) – so that is how I wired the new one. The dryer works, but I don’t know what risks I am running without a ground. Thoughts?
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Ground redundancy by Brandon :: NR9 :: Show
I have some experience with wiring houses as an electrician’s assistant (when I was in high school) and my impression on this issue is that it’s really not that big of a deal to go without a ground wire. In the houses I helped wire, all of the white/neutral wires and the ground/bare wires from the house were connected to the same place (the ground rod) in the junction box. Your house might be different since it’s older; you can check by taking off the cover panel of your junction box and seeing if the white and bare wires go back to the same place (usually one of two long manifold clamp-down apparatuses running the length of the box – one for white/neutral and bare/ground wires and one for the black/hot wires).
The idea for having two wires go back to the same place is redundancy, and I’m pretty sure that’s something required by current code. I don’t think the rest of your house is per code, though, with it being so old and considering that the dryer connection wasn’t wired with a ground.
You could run a new ground wire, but that might be a big pain, depending on how your house is wired (i.e., does the wire go through the roof or under the house, etc.). If you can figure a way to access the necessary locations, however, you’d just have to either replace the existing wire with a modern dryer circuit wire (four wires instead of three), or leave the existing wire and run the ground wire by itself.
It's there for your safety! by Occams :: NR8 :: Show
The ground wire is an important safety feature. It ensures that any hot internal wire that becomes loose or frayed and touches the metal parts of the chassis (which you might touch) will be grounded. This will cause the fuse to blow, but will mean that the chassis is safe at all times. Some modern devices with plastic cases need no ground wire because the body cannot become live, even if touched by a hot internal wire.
If there is no internal short then the ground wire contributes nothing but safety potential.
Removing it will not affect the performance of the device but you may be contributing to the removal of stupid genes from the human gene pool (yours or your child’s)