> This is potentially deadly advice. A neutral/grounding fault will energize all your home devices with live potential; same with a live/neutral swap (unlikely but possible with Indian wiring standards).
You are wrong. In the US the NEC requires this. If you bother to look inside your breaker panel you will find the neutral and ground wires are literally screwed down to the same bus bar.
Any path your body (or the soil outside) can provide back to the generator pales in comparison to the neutral tap provided by the transformer. Grounding to dirt is about static electrical discharge, not the voltage provided by the generating station.
The safety of providing a grounding wire is that metal parts of appliances must be connected to that ground. The ground wire itself is both bonded to neutral and connected to a metal grounding rod driven into the dirt. If any part of the appliance's internal works becomes energized and touches the metal casing the direct path to ground is designed to create a short circuit and trip the breaker immediately, rather than sitting there waiting for a human to come along and complete the circuit.
If ground weren't bonded and the ground dried out or the grounding rod weren't properly installed then the scenario you describe would occur. A single faulty appliance would back-feed voltage onto every grounded appliance in the building. So in fact bonding is what creates safety, not the other way around.
> In the US the NEC requires this. If you bother to look inside your breaker panel you will find the neutral and ground wires are literally screwed down to the same bus bar.
It could be different in US, but in modern European installations the PE and N bars are separate; older installations use common PEN; and even older ones don't even have PE. Each of the wiring schemes requires different approach and poses different hazards. There's no single recipe that would work on all of them.
My bottom line is: don't make arbitrary connections in the breaker box without proper knowledge and training; and don't give random electrical advice on the internet without knowledge of local codes.
> It could be different in US, but in modern European installations the PE and N bars are separate
In the US a single PE+N wire feeds into the building. All building wiring is separated as in Europe. They are tied together in only one location, usually wherever the main switch is.
Just like Europe, really old installs in the US don't have ground (PE). Some are retrofitted with ground like my house in SF. One thing people should never do is connect neutral to ground at a secondary point. It can be tempting when you don't have access to run a ground wire but creates a serious potential for safety problems. The way to handle that is to install a GFCI (RCD) plug and put a sticker on it stating "No equipment ground" - the outlets actually come with those stickers for that purpose :)
As far as I know in European systems where the building has separate PE+N feeds they are still bonded together, it just happens at the transformer. I could be wrong about that though!
I downvoted you because again this is potentially dangerous advice for the plurality of people who live outside the USA, without referring to local standards.
For example in the UK neutral is traditionally grounded at the electrical substation, which serves several hundred homes, and all lines are separate / unbonded within the house.
In the most recent PME standard in the UK the earth and neutral are bonded back to the substation as the Protected Earthed Neutral but that is achieved on the supply-side, not the in consumer equipment.
OP's very first sentence clearly stated they are in India, where this is obviously dangerous advice because most devices (and piping) connect their surfaces to Earth, which is new Neutral.
You are wrong. In the US the NEC requires this. If you bother to look inside your breaker panel you will find the neutral and ground wires are literally screwed down to the same bus bar.
Any path your body (or the soil outside) can provide back to the generator pales in comparison to the neutral tap provided by the transformer. Grounding to dirt is about static electrical discharge, not the voltage provided by the generating station.
The safety of providing a grounding wire is that metal parts of appliances must be connected to that ground. The ground wire itself is both bonded to neutral and connected to a metal grounding rod driven into the dirt. If any part of the appliance's internal works becomes energized and touches the metal casing the direct path to ground is designed to create a short circuit and trip the breaker immediately, rather than sitting there waiting for a human to come along and complete the circuit.
If ground weren't bonded and the ground dried out or the grounding rod weren't properly installed then the scenario you describe would occur. A single faulty appliance would back-feed voltage onto every grounded appliance in the building. So in fact bonding is what creates safety, not the other way around.