🚀 go-pugleaf

>What I have wanted to know for years is,  why is residential service
>referred to ground at all?  I understand why they balance and ground 
>high-voltage transmission lines.  It seems to me that, if the transformer
>was used to isolate the residential service from ground everyone would
>be a lot safer.  How about it?

Safety is best when the transformer is center-tapped and grounded
at the utility pole.  A totally ungrounded circuit is subject to accidental
connection to dangerous voltages with no warnings available. Center-
tapping is the way they do it, except that the basic supply voltage is
220 v. balanced to ground/neutral. You plug into one half of the supply
when you use the common residential outlet.

The notion of one-side-is-ground hails back to the beginnings
of everything. There was a Samuel F. B. Morse who had something
to do with a single-ended telegraph circuit between Washington and Baltimore
(or was it Piladelphia ?) where the earth really WAS the other side of the
circuit..

--les
bigbang!celerity!les