benclark•16d agoMost Upvoted

Walked into a crawlspace with 47V on the return line, now I check grounding first

Client in Modesto kept getting shocked touching their server rack, we chased it for 3 visits replacing PSUs. Finally ran a multimeter from the rack to the floor drain and saw 47 volts, it was a floating neutral on the building's ancient panel. Bonded the rack to the new ground rod I drove behind the shop and the issue just vanished. Anyone else run into phantom voltage on customer sites that turns out to be a grounding problem instead of hardware?

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the_claire15d ago

Man, 47 volts is just the building saying "I dare you" at that point. My favorite is when you get that tingly little buzz touching the rack and the customer swears it's static electricity from the carpet... like no, buddy, static doesn't make a multimeter sing. I once had a dishwasher in a rental that was reading 80 volts to ground, landlord swore the machine was toast, nope, neutral was just having a vacation on the water pipe. People really don't get how much weird stuff floats around in old wiring until you literally ground it out and everything acts normal again.