I know that the answer is yes, I should, but outlets near the setup are not grounded (even though they look like they are) and I don’t want to have wires running though my living room.
The real question is what are potential problems ? Occasional system reboots? Permanent damage to PSU? Permanent damage to other components?
Do you have money to replace everything plugged into those outlets, and sufficient home insurance that also ignores such things? Then, no, I guess.
Just take an hour and make a ground yourself. It doesn’t take a lot of specialized knowledge to do so.
Edit to say, I’m pretty sure any surge protector worth itself has a ground output on it already. Just run a wire from it into the literal ground if possible, or over to a place in your home that is properly grounded. You’re just trying to give something like a lightning strike a path of least resistance to discharge into. Any metal conduit in your home SHOULD be grounded, so that’s an easy option.
Electric shock to you? Get an electrician to check it and sign it off?
I know that the answer is yes
I mean, there you go, and all of the above. I’d add in a pretty large fire risk too. I hear my battery backups kick in regularly, and we’re talking about enough power to equal a large appliance (at least in my case). It’s 100% worth it to move them to a grounded outlet.
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Install GFCI plugs. [1]
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Buy a small, appropriately sized UPS.
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Profit?
Disclaimer: Am not actually electrician. Just know this about GFCI from electrician friends and pointing to a decent explainer.
GFCI plugs can be installed without a ground wire. https://diy.stackexchange.com/questions/225370/i-live-in-an-older-home-without-ground-wiring-is-it-safe-to-install-3-prong-gfc ↩︎
You are correct that this is technically in code and would protect against shock hazards in a neutral error situation but you also get the opportunity for the outlet to pop during the day when nobody is home and the battery to die.
We had a situation in our old house where someone who was technically correct but didn’t think it through had a gfci outlet upstream of the refrigerator outlet. Thankfully it popped while someone was home and we got everything corrected before we lost everything in the fridge.
For sure, a fridge is a really bad one to be using on an actual ungrounded GFCI, exactly for the reason of risk of expired food.
I like my homeserver but if something trips and its offline for a while it’s not gonna ruin my day.
The battery can be recharged eventually unless it’s already be discharged many times or it’s left alone and dead long enough to kill any ability to recharge it.
It will not affect system stability, but… Surge protectors do not work at all without a ground wire to drop excess voltage to. Any kind of line voltage disturbance could kill every device.
Additionally, without any ground wire to pull the housings of devices to ground, the potential for a short to energize the case and then electrocute you is also high.
additionally additionally, if you have grounded outlets that don’t actually have a ground connection running to them, that means either the wiring system is broken or it was “updated” by an unlicensed hack job who has undoubtedly made numerous more dangerous decisions elsewhere in the circuit.
If your house is entirely ungrounded you really should have an electrician come update it ASAP. Outlet grounds have been mandatory since 1971. The chances are high that wiring predating that code is still using old cloth-wrapped wire insulation or even knob&tube, both of which are huge fire risks as the insulation is decayed badly by now. It’s expensive to have all new wire pulled but it is necessary.
Yeah it’s pricey, very pricey, but the risks are just too high for a home not to be properly grounded anymore. Homeowners have had 50 years to do it, it’s time to get it done.
Heh. House I rented was built before ubiquitous electricity. At some point, someone slapped a fuse box on the outside of the back wall and drilled a bunch of 1" holes in said wall to pass wiring. House was built on piers, so they just dragged wires around to places where they wanted outlets, which were mostly planted in the floor. Not a ground wire on site. I have no idea how they got away with renting that out, but it’s not like I called code enforcement, either.
Can confirm. Neighbors house had an attic fire with knob & tube wiring.
… Just like the stuff still in my place today. Eek! Landlord won’t upgrade unless there is a problem. In my house, the breakers are all 20amp and that’s a lot to run on, best guess, 70 year old wires.
Oh, and do not assume anything is wired as expected. Test after. I’ve found a couple plugs “upgraded” to 3-prong by jumping the load and ground together. That made for a fun firework show when my metal fan touched something metal. Even the landlord was impressed by that stupidity.
A cheaper solution is to take a copper wire and connect the ground screw of the socket to a water pipe. It does the job and is better than nothing.
Note to anyone heeding this advice: it has to be a metal water pipe, no plastic.
Looks like your landlord and the people who flipped my house hired the same electrician. They did the same stupid thing jumping the load and ground so that it’d pass inspection (the little tester will show everything properly grounded).
Unnnnfortunately, that’s also a good way to cause serious damage to things and in my case it managed to short in such a way that it melted one of the phases coming into the house and damn near burned my house down.
Don’t do stupid shit with your outlets, kids, because uh, yeah, fire.
I’ve found a couple plugs “upgraded” to 3-prong by jumping the load and ground together. That made for a fun firework show when my metal fan touched something metal. Even the landlord was impressed by that stupidity.
Ah, the good old reverse polarity bootleg ground.
Fun fact: RPBG is the one fault that those plug-in outlet testers can’t recognize
Edit: Wait, no, that would be hot bootleg ground, they should catch that. RPBG has the hot and neutral switched, and also a bootleg ground to the neutral that’s actually hot
Additionally, without any ground wire to pull the housings of devices to ground, the potential for a short to energize the case and then electrocute you is also high.
this will also cause resets and instability. have seen it first hand.
