I have been in multiple classes that I needed to learn what grounding is, and I have watched lots of videos, but the thing Is I never really understood it. Pls help me I’m begging you.
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So a general rule in Physics and Chemistry is any kind of particle tends to like to go from where there is a lot of it (“an area of high concentration”) to where there is not a lot of it (“an area of low concentration”) until it balances out.
This is easy to see if you add dye to water. The part of the water you add the dye has a lot of dye. Those particles start spreading out to the rest of the water, where there aren’t any dye particles. Even if you never stir the water, if you wait long enough you get dyed water in a state where the particles are spread out evenly.
This also works for energy! If you heat up one end of a metal bar, the heat will spread throughout the entire bar. The part you heated up has a lot of heat energy, and it will do its best to start moving to places that don’t have a lot of heat energy.
Electricity works just like that. The battery or whatever power source you have has a LOT of electrons ready to roll. “Ground” is something you connect to it that does NOT have a lot of electrons, if any at all. So without any other force needed, if you connect “a lot of electrons” on one end of a circuit to “not many electrons” on the other end, those electrons will flow through the circuit and try to make things “equal”.
That’s why batteries have two ends. One is a part where the chemical reaction can produce electrons. The other end is a part that doesn’t have many electrons. Connecting both ends means electrons will move from one side of the battery to the other through the circuit until there’s more or less the same amount of electrons at both ends: that’s when the battery is “dead”.
Sometimes houses and other large things have a literal pole stuck in the ground that parts of outlets are connected to. That may seem odd, because the Earth is VERY big and clearly has a lot of electrons. But it’s important to note it’s about the CONCENTRATION of electrons, not just the number. A power plant creating power is organizing a ton of electrons and shoving them through a wire so it’s very “crowded”. You can imagine it like a bus that’s got too many people on it. The people want to get the heck off. The Earth is massive, so even though it has a lot of electrons it’s not very “crowded” in any particular place. So if for whatever reason power is connected to the Earth, the electrons happily “get off the bus” and travel to the ground, where they’ll spread out through the planet. We do this in case something goes wrong in some device because we’d rather all that electricity travel through wires and into the Earth than decide to travel through your body or materials like your wall that might heat up and catch fire.
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