The ground wire exits your junction box, but it is not attached to your junction box. It may be acceptable for the ground wire to attach to the fixture mounting hardware only, but if you have a metal light fixture you definitely want it directly grounded. Sign up to join this community.
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Create a free Team What is Teams? Learn more. Is it okay to have an ungrounded light fixture? Ask Question. Asked 8 years, 4 months ago. Active 3 years, 2 months ago. Viewed k times. Improve this question. Tester k 73 73 gold badges silver badges bronze badges. If it's a metal box, and a metal light fixture, and the box is grounded. This is by no means an acceptable alternative to an actual properly designed grounding system in the fixture, but it may be enough if it's needed.
Fixtures didn't have grounds for decades. But, if the wiring frays in the future, it's possible for the fixture to become electrified, and you'll get shocked if you touch it. The grounding wire is supposed to draw as much current as possible, were this to happen, so that your circuit breaker would trip. Best answer: So the original poster was asking what might happen if, despite best efforts, they happened to write the new fixture in backwards.
As aubilenon mentioned, house wiring is AC, even though neutral should be the same as ground, from the view of the bulb both legs are the same. So assuming it's externally switched, try your best to match white to white and black to black, but if you're putting in the effort you're not that much more likely to get it worrying than anyone else even a professional , and the universe isn't going to implode on the off chance you got it backwards.
And I'm trying to think of how one could safely check the outlet, with an emphasis on paranoia. One way might be to get one of those socket to plug adapters, and, using a voltmeter, measure from hot and neutral to a known ground.
The presumed "hot" side should be floating relative to ground, neutral should pull that voltmeter to zero. You could also build a cord with an external ground wire to its own plug or a 3 prong adapter with a wire to ground running from the silly tab so you can plug that cord into a known grounded socket, plug the 2 wire plug into such an adapter, and use a circuit tester on it.
Do you know for sure what's in your ceiling? In my last house, the lights all had no ground wire because there were transformers in the ceiling that they were all plugged into so they were running on 12V power. Which makes them pretty damn safe. You might be lucky And have the same thing. Best answer: You can test polarity by using a digital voltmeter that you could borrow from a friend.
You don't need a ground. You can test using just a single probe. Set the meter for AC voltage, turn on the light switch, then carefully touch one probe to first one terminal of the light and then the other.
It doesn't matter which probe you use. Let the other probe dangle free, away from your body or hold it safely in your other hand by the plastic. You don't want to touch the metal of the second probe because you would be depending on the circuitry of the meter to protect you. If there is a fault in the meter or you accidentally set it to amps instead of volts you could get a shock, so don't touch the metal of either probe with your body. The neutral wire will indicate a voltage of 0 to no more than 2 volts.
The hot wire will indicate anywhere from 10 volts to volts, depending on the voltmeter. This works because the digital meter is very high impedance and the AC voltage couples weakly to its surroundings capacitively. Or if you can't find a digital volt meter get one of these non-contact voltage testers or this.
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