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.
In: 469
At least with AC the electricity does kinda dissolve in the Earth. The area around the grounding rod acts as a capacitor that is charging and discharging as the AC waves go. You could split the planet in half and connect each side of the circuit to each half and it would still work.
In the water analogy imagine a pipe that is closed on both ends and you try to push the water to flow forwards and backwards – it won’t. Now connect some big reservoir on each end of the pipe – now you can make it flow back and forth. It can be the same reservoir on both ends or two different ones, doesn’t matter.
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