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too truthful about the absence of grounds
Thursday, July 20 2017
I was over at the Brick Mansion this morning to fix another apartment-to-apartment leak. Water was coming through the ceiling of #1L from the bathroom of #2. I'd investigated a similar leak about a year ago and decided it had probably resulted from an undisclosed overflow of a toilet. This time, though, the new tenant of 2 seemed convincing when he said that the only source of the leak could've been a shower. So I caulked all the gaps I could find around the bathtub and also put a couple shallow containers on the drop ceiling in the apartment below. The idea is to catch any water that happens through so it can evaporate before it can come through. While I was up in #2 doing the caulking, the tenant (who appears to have some sort of stay-at-home internet job like me) asked about the absence of grounds in the various outlets in his apartment, most of which were only suitable for plugs having two prongs. The tenant expressed an irrational faith in the protective power of grounds for his computer equipment ("it's my whole life"), and I could tell it was fruitless to argue with him. I suggested I go get my multimeter and see if a ground could be found in any of these two-prong boxes. If the boxes themselves were ground, he could use one of those two-to-three prong adapters. But what I found was that there was only one duplex outlet in the entire apartment that had any ground at all. It was in the bedroom, supplying power to an enormous television. There were some three-prong outlets in the kitchen (and these were even GFI outlets), but their grounds all seemed non-existent. A GFI outlet doesn't do anything other than supply power if it isn't properly grounded. Perhaps I shouldn't've been so honest with my appraisal of the situation, because now it seems like I've roped myself into doing further electrical work.
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