chris.knudson
Well-known member
That's how the electricians do it!
Anyone know where to find this part?
- Thread starter Robert
- Start date
Robert
Reverse Engineer
The house I grew up in had an old 1950's water heater that only had two wires, no ground...
Somewhere along the line some electrician realized that wasn't safe and wedged a ground wire into the cover that went over the heating elements.
Wheew, thank goodness for old Sparky, for a minute there (okay, like 60 years) that thing wasn't up to code!
Somewhere along the line some electrician realized that wasn't safe and wedged a ground wire into the cover that went over the heating elements.
Wheew, thank goodness for old Sparky, for a minute there (okay, like 60 years) that thing wasn't up to code!
chris.knudson
Well-known member
When I lived in Memphis, my house was built in 1926, and the house I have in DC was built in 1930 -- wanna talk about not up to code? Hell my Memphis house had knob and tube wiring. Every time I opened up a wall I got a surprise. Not much different here, but I've lived here for 23 years, and little by little, I've been bringing her up to code.The house I grew up in had an old 1950's water heater that only had two wires, no ground...
Somewhere along the line some electrician realized that wasn't safe and wedged a ground wire into the cover that went over the heating elements.
Wheew, thank goodness for old Sparky, for a minute there (okay, like 60 years) that thing wasn't up to code!
chris.knudson
Well-known member
Ironically, knob and tube is fairly safe compared to some of the things I've seen. With knob and tube, you just need to add a ground -- and in those old houses, you have a network of radiant heat piping that can provide your ground. Some of the most dangerous stuff I have seen is in houses built in the late 60s and 70s with aluminum wiring and Federal Pacific (or as a lot of electricians refer to them -- Federal Pathetic) breaker boxes. Talk about a fire hazard...
PapaBear
Well-known member
I recall a few Zinsco models from that era that were pretty bad as well.
chris.knudson
Well-known member
That whole era was bad. The first house I owned was built in the 70s, and I was scared to live there because of what was inside the walls. I'll take a historic house any day over that.
I worked for a few years reconditioning/rebuilding those big power circuit breakers (the ones the size of a dorm sized refrigerator and larger). In our shop we saw the good, the bad and the ugly in breakers built anytime over the last 100 years.
We also had the same love for the FP breakers… we called them “fk’n pathetic”
When I started building pedals I was concerned about ground loops, coming from building amps. But I guess the voltages are simply not high enough to form eddy currents or whatever. I used not to ground to both jacks thinking that I would induce a ground loop, but was told I should do to ensure a good ground in case the first ground failed. So I tried and have not heard any difference whatsoever. In an amp the hum could be overwhelming, but in a pedal? No difference. Not in any pedal I have yet built anyway. There may come a time...
The only ground loops I had with pedals was back in the day, I had one of those DOD steel pedalboards that the pedals bolted to. So you had pedals all bussed with common ground plane, then connected with patch cables and of course the power supply was non-isolated so you had that ground path, and since the power supply had a grounded cable, you also had that ground path to the amp.
Solution- every other pedal power cable and every other patch cable between pedals needed to have a ground lift to minimize paths.
Within a single pedal though? Never had a loop.
Coming from the amp world as well, grounding is a bit of an art, with some science involved and just a little bit of luck/magic involved to make it work right!!! Always cracks me up when people connect their pedalboards or multi-fx into a tube amp using 4 cable method, then blaming the pedals for ground loops (which they just call “noise”, and it takes you 3 hours to get them to tell you what you are trying to diagnose), when the reality is they don’t realize they are upsetting that fragile little balance of the internal amp ground scheme
