My father wanted to kill a mole by putting a steel pipe into the ground and connecting live wire to it. I thought it would cause the short circuit but it didn’t. Why?
In: 88
First let me clarify why we call it earthing.
For electricity to flow we have to connect the + and – poles of a battery or any other voltage source and complete a circuit.
We can use wires or anything that is conductive like water or dirt.
With dirt we can stick two poles into the ground and connect one to the plus pole of a battery and connect the other to the minus pole and electricity will flow through the dirt.
With the AC system we have a Generator that is equivalent to the Battery in the the DC System with a Hot Wire as + Pole and Neutral Wire as – pole.
The AC electricity System usually connects the neutral wire at various points to a pole in the ground to earth it and make it possible for electricity to flow from the hotwire through the ground, back to the neutral wire.
This is done for multiple reasons, mainly safety.
The circuit with the pipe in the ground would be the following:
Generator Plus – Hot Wire – the pipe in the dirt – dirt – grounding rod at the house (Transformer Substation) – Neutral Wire – Generator Minus.
Now to your question. Reasons i could come up with why there was no short circuit:
1: Your dad simply connected the Neutral Wire not the “Hot” Wire to the pipe and therefore there was no circuit for electricity to flow.
2: The connection of the pipe to the ground was not good enough. That would mean that some electicity was flowing but not enough for anything to happen.
3:If you take out the grounding rod at the house (Transformer Substation)
You live in an area that uses an “IT” AC grounding system. In this system the Neutral Wire is not connected to Ground or “Earth” at any point in the System completely isolating it from the dirt.
This would mean that there is no circuit closed that the electricity could flow through when you connect the hot wire to the dirt.
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