Always heard about it but never knew why.
In: Technology
You want electricity flowing in the circuit that’s made for it and nowhere else. In particular, you don’t want to have it flowing through you if you touch a device. There are two general ideas how to do that:
* Make sure nothing that can be touched is conducting electricity: Cover everything in insulating material.
* Make sure everything that can be touched is already at the same electric potential. No potential difference means no current. That common electric potential is the “ground” and it’s usually connected to the Earth itself.
It’s a bit like making something earthquake-proof by putting everything onto the floor. Now everything is at the same height and nothing can fall down any more.
Circuits work just fine without it. It’s only there for safety reasons in case something goes wrong.
If voltage gets somewhere it’s not supposed to and you touch the device, that voltage can form a current through your body. Which can severely injure or kill you.
Grounding connects almost anywhere rogue voltage can be, and gives it an easy path back to the panel.
Unfortunately, a really satisfying answer is well beyond the scope of ELI5. Take a community college course named something like “Physics: Electricity and Magnetism” if you want to properly understand this.
A ground wire provides a safe path for electricity in the event of a short circuit.
Imagine you have a refrigerator that has a worn out wire that has a hole in it, so the live wire touches the body of the fridge.
If it wasn’t grounded this would just charge the body of the 120 volts and could shock you badly if you touched the door of the fridge. But if the body of the fridge is grounded, the short will instead drain away to ground, making it safe to touch the body of the fridge.
Imagine electricity is like a bunch of really fast and energetic little ants that run through wires. Sometimes, these ants can escape and go places they shouldn’t, which can be dangerous, like making a lamp too hot. Grounding is like giving those ants a safe path to go back into the ground outside where they can’t cause any trouble.
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