I just added a circuit to my breaker box and it got me thinking about how the wiring all works. The neutral and ground both go to the bad bar in the circuit box, if they’re both in the same place then why can’t that just be wired inside the outlet and a single wire runs the length instead of two?
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In many countries in the world, probably all of them outside North America, that is not the case.
Here in Europe, only ground goes to a bus bar, which will be going into the actual ground.
The neutral stays next to the phase/live, and both go the distribution transformer somewhere in your street/neighborhood. At that point, the neutral is connected to the ground of the transformer.
neutral is common for all connections on that transformer. The European transformers are also much bigger than those funny bins people in the US have on a pole. Our transformers will be the size of a small van and power multiple streets.
By fixing the neutral to ground at the transformer, rather than at your house, they know for sure that the voltage difference between neutral and phase is what they want it to be. If the neutral was created at each house separately, there could be differences.
Because there is some distance between your outlet and the transformer, which might be 5 or 10 streets further, there actually will/can be a small voltage drop on the neutral. So if you measure the voltage between neutral and real ground, you might measure something like 2 or 5 volts.
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