why electricity needs to be earthed
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It’a a safety thing, since people constantly touch the earth we are at the same voltage as the ground, so if you connect appliance cases to earth as well, this means that even if something was to go wrong inside you can’t get shocked because you are at the same voltage
everything will still work perfectly fine without an earth connection, but you might just get nasty shocks when touching things, and this happened to me because my dishwasher wasn’t properly earthed
Because devices, especially large with “naked” electrics (like electric engines that need air cooling and have metal casings), like vacuums, fridges, washing machines, dryers etc. can accumulate charge (literally like a capacitor) if they’re poorly made or maintained, if the electrical components somehow contact the surface.
And the thing is, they WILL discharge at the first opportunity they get. Unfortunately, if they’re not grounded, that opportunity might be you touching them. So it’s now a standard practice for them to come with a grounding pin to prevent exactly that.
Electronics generally don’t need them, because they draw less power, but something like PC or gaming laptop power supplies are also grounded for similar reasons.
It doesn’t need to be earthed. Every electronic device with a 3rd prong will work just fine without it unless the manufacturer puts some safety interlock on there to make sure it is grounded. The ground on all 3 pronged appliances is there for safety. All appliances that have a metal case are require to be grounded in case there is a short that electrifies the case. If a short in the device gets shorted to the case without it being grounded touching the case would cause a shock. Since the case has a path to ground, any short to the case will cause the circuit breaker to trip. Some devices can detect current leaking to ground and simply shut down the device.
You want most stuff that might touch other stuff to have roughly the same amount of charge. If you don’t ground something and it builds up a really big charge, it will eventually touch something else, and when it does, that could be dangerous. It doesn’t so much matter that they all touch “the earth.” The important thing is that they all touch something in common. If you could wire everything that might potentially touch to each other, that’d be pretty much just as good as touching the ground, but that’s awkward, especially if the mailman later explodes touching your door.
Electricity wants to go to the earth. If it doesn’t have a nice path along a conducting wire, it’ll go through you to get there. You don’t want that.
Have you ever had a shopping cart give you a little electric shock? The same thing can happen with household appliances, they can accumulate charge over time. Earthing avoids this by connecting various parts of the appliance to the ground.
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