I’ll start by saying I will call an electrician to do the work, as I don’t feel comfortable working with Taiwanese electrical grid stuff and I’m not an electrician.
So none of my 3 prong outlets are grounded. I checked because I was getting the occasional small shocks from my computer case. Checked with a multimeter, and checked behind them for loose wires and no ground wires were there.
Decided to check the circuit panel to see if there is a ground wire or if they will have to somehow run one from outside.
To my understanding green is ground and white is neutral. But I thought they should be kept on separate bars. So is the green one ground and they just connected it to a neutral bar?
Looks like a PME (Protective Multiple Earthing) system to me, very common in UK modern wiring installations. But, I bow to anyone with better knowledge of the Taiwan system as I know in a lot of premises there is no earth.
Assuming they were following the conventions, yes green (sometimes green & yellow) for ground and white for neutral.
It is recommended to ground the neutral, so that’s what you are seeing.
I sent this picture to my friend and apparently their dad is an electrician in Taiwan. He said the green wire is ground and that it shouldn’t be connected with the white wires, he also mentioned that there should be 2 green wires. He said I should get that fixed and that it probably wouldn’t be too expensive, but didn’t give a number.
I’m not sure which meter is mine, but I know there is a green going to at least one of them.
I used a multi-meter to check if the bar and green wire would complete a circuit and they do. 110v when measured from a circuit.
I was looking around outside my building earlier and noticed that in two spots there are random green wires coming out of the ground. One is cut and not connected to anything, the other is going up the side to someone’s building.
Yea that green wire could work if you’re willing and able to get a wire spliced to that. People do funny things with grounds here and it is almost seen as optional here. On my panel the neutral came from the transformer center tap. But I have 3 phase supply which requires a transformer. The ground from the meter went to the case of the transformer and then to nothing in the panel. I can tie that to ground for that. However I’d have to rewire everything to do this.
The problem is there are no 3C cables in Taiwan, standard 110/220v cable is 2 conductor, not 3. You would have to replace it with a 3 conductor cable or fish a separate green wire through the wall. Not easy to say the least.
Typical in wall cable in the US looks like this:
They do not have this in Taiwan unless you look hard in special shops. All they have is something like the picture but only with 2 wires in it. So for them to actually connect ground it is more work! That is to say if they installed a 3 pronged plug chances are they used the 2 wire cable meaning the ground is not used at all.
I’ve seen ground, green, wires in my boxes before. When in doubt, grab a shovel, walk around the perimeter and find that plate/rod. Too many times I’ve seen the ground just struck to something down the line without a real proper grounding
