I know that electricity doesn’t just dissolve in the ground, it must return to the power source. But once the electricity is in the grounding device, how does it find its way back to the substation if it can be relatively far away?
Edit: I know ground isn’t used in normal working mode and where I live there’s no grounding in sockets.
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I haven’t seen this many bad answers on a post in a while. Not that they’re wrong, I just don’t think they’re answering your question.
1) AC vs DC
DC or Direct Current is a battery where charges are actually flowing through the loop. Water in a pipe and all that
AC or Alternating Current is more like waves on a beach that go in and out. Your house uses AC electricity
2) Relative Ground
“Ground” is just zero potential energy. On a battery it’s the negative side, on an AC circuit it’s the return wire. Potential energy here is a lot like gravitational potential energy. if you set something on the table it’s not going to fall through the table. In that state it has zero potential. But it has a “larger” zero than something on the floor; after all of the table disappeared the object would fall. Relative ground is kinda like that: it’s relative to the system and “zero” is whatever energy you define it as. You could also think of it kinda like temperature, where 0°C is “larger” than 0°F.
3) Common Ground
When different devices have different zero levels, it creates problems. The two wires in your house create a loop, one feeding electricity and the other being a common ground wire, aka neutral. But why do we call it neutral and not ground?
4) Earth Ground
Earth Ground or True Ground is absolute zero. Going back to the temperature analogy, if your neutral is zero Celsius then the earth ground is zero Kelvin (absolute Zero). It’s an energy sink. Now, in your house earth ground isn’t directly connected to the hot or neutral wires (well, not OP’s house as they say their is two wire, but you get what I mean).
Earth Ground is a safety feature. In most applications that use it, the hot and neutral connect to the circuit while earth ground is connected to the enclosure. To get specific, let’s look at a lightbulb. Hot connects to the electricity flowing in, neutral to the electricity flowing out. Ground doesn’t connect to the bulb itself, but it is connected to the metal of the lamp. That way if something goes wrong and electricity starts flowing through the metal, all that electricity flows into the ground and you won’t get killed by touching it. And when we say “into the ground”, we mean it quite literally as there is a spike in the ground somewhere around your house the Ground wire connects to.
So there ya go. There’s no grounding on your sockets because it hasn’t been deemed necessary everywhere. There are all other ways to protect against the same thing an earth ground does, for example surge protectors and GFCI (Ground Fault Circuit Interrupt) outlets that will stop working if they see electricity going somewhere other than the neutral line. Fuses can also help, but by the time you’re pulling enough electricity to break a fuse some damage may already be done.
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