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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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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)
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Ground redundancy by Brandon :: NR9 :: on 02 January 2007
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.
RE: Ground redundancy by Brandon :: NR9 :: on 02 January 2007
Another thing to check is the dryer manual and warranty information. The manual could address this issue specifically and the warranty might be contingent on ground wire redundancy. I haven't actually seen a dryer that did (I don't know that I've read any dryer manual or warranty that closely), but it's worth checking.
Ground Is Important by VnutZ :: NR8 :: on 02 January 2007
I dunno ... maybe it depends on the appliance you're using. I for one have "felt" the effect of not having a ground with my computers. Korean apartments in Seoul were notorious for not having grounded wall connections. I noticed that if I touched my computer chassis lightly, I could "feel" vibrations through it (not from the HD BTW) that were not present when the same equipment was grounded. Furthermore, I noticed that if my skin made contact with it's metal corners ... I would receive an enormous shock and a very mild electrical burn.
Oddly, though, this only happened to a few people on the same equipment. Not everyone could "feel" the anomaly or the burn.
Electrical Engineers?
RE: Ground Is Important by gnifyus :: NR7 :: on 02 January 2007
The ground wire will only carry current if there is an electrical malfunction like a frayed or broken wire that shorts to the chassis, or other problem that might cause the “hot” wire to connect to the outside of your appliance. By having a ground wire, the current travels to ground through the wire instead of through you; the wire being a much better conductor. This situation will usually trip the breaker if the short is bad enough, but on dry ground or something, the current may not be enough for this to happen. You will notice that modern day plugs that don’t have a ground wire will have a wide terminal and a narrow terminal. The narrow terminal is the “hot wire”. This is done so, say in the instance of an incandescent light, the hot wire goes to the center terminal on the bulb, greatly reducing the chance that the fixture itself will be connected to the hot wire.
That being said, if VNutZ79 had been able to simply turn the plug around on his computer in the socket (reverse terminals) the problem would have probably gone away. I fixed an outside Christmas light decoration that was giving shocks when it was wet out simply by doing this recently.
I found that the dining room in my house had all the sockets wired backwards, in other words the narrow terminal was where the wide one should be completely defeating any safety gained from this style of plug.
To sum it up, the ground wire is a safety which you would be glad to have if something were to go wrong especially in the case of a dryer where there is double the chance of this due to 2 hot wires used to get 220 volts.