🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Jul21.153320.10560@wuecl.wustl.edu> anbo@wuee1.wustl.edu (Albrecht Jander) writes:
>A couple of years back the power feed to our house shorted to the ground
>wire, which was grounded through our water pipes.  The effect was that 
>the water in the pipes started to boil and the pipe burst.  Unaware of

Back in the late '60s, I lived in an old farmhouse in the middle of an
orange grove in Riverside County, California. The water supply came from
a 4000-gallon tank about 8 feet higher than the house (the water was
diverted from the Gage irrigation canal into the tank once a month during
the 48-hour irrigation access 'window' for that grove). Because the
'head' was so low - 8 feet doesn't buy much pressure - there was a 3/4 hp
pump and captive-air tank in the garage to boost the pressure to usable
levels.

The ground connection for the house's power feed was, of course, tied to
the cold water line at the house. Well, that cold water line ran to the
garage and the pump. During the summer, the soil in the yard was always
extremely dry, so most of the effective grounding was being
accomplished by the piping between the pump and the big tank up the hill,
which ran through the grove which has nice moist soil. 

One day, I was doing some repairs on the pump and its
motor (yeh, I had turned off the breaker), and opened the 
pipe unions that connected the pump into the
house water lines. What I had done, of course, was to de-ground the
entire house. And, worse, I was holding BOTH sides of the union while
I was unscrewing it. So I got a juicy arm-to-arm jolt. Worse yet, I
was barefooted and in shorts - this was, after all, going to be
a wet, messy job. It took me quite a few seconds to let go and I was
a basket case afterwards. Needless to say, I put a nice 8 AWG wire and
two ground clamps on that plumbing to take the pump out of the ground
path.