On 19 Apr 2006, wrote:

mc spake thus:

I gather that you are in the UK (hence "ring" wiring
structure, which I like, instead of the American daisychain)
and that everything is in the same room. It should work fine.


So how does house wiring work in the UK? Is there more than one
grounding ("earthing") point? And how is this better?

(Here, the Merkin practice is to ground the "service
panel"--the box where the big wires come into the house--to a
single ground rod, with everything running downstream from
that.)

By the way, this brings up a strange experience I had recently
doing some wiring. I was working for a guy who owns two houses
right next to each other, and he wanted to run a cable TV
connection from one house to the other. I was about to connect
the cable in the attic of the house that was the source of the
signal when I got a little tingle. After grabbing a VOM, it
turned out that there was about a 20 volt difference between
the two cable grounds.

Mc doesn't understand ground loops. You can get them between two
boxes plugged into the same double socket.

Your tingle was because your equipment is not grounded, and is
perfectly normal.

Does your "perfectly normal" mean:

"there is no fault and no danger (until the ground is
actually needed and then will be a danger)"