Open ground question

Wayne Dohnal wrote:

If the hot happens to short to ground and you make contact with the neutral while grounded, ouch!

If bonded then a hot to ground short trips the breaker on overload & a neutral short to ground will trip a GFCI breaker or outlet on ground fault if it is between the short and the bonded source.

AFAIK I'm the only one on the forum who has taken the position that there's not a clear "winner" with bonded vs. unbonded. With some faults, unbonded is clearly safer. With other faults, as noted above, unbonded just masks the problem and creates a hazard at the same time. If you don't know what fault your system is going to have, you don't know which is the better way to go. Fortunately, faults are rare, which I why I believe that either method is permitted with small generators. If one way or the other were clearly superior I assume the codes would be changed to require it.

your not the only one, I also agree with you. When your hooked to shore power, you should have a bonded ground/neutral a the post, same as a house so trailer ground is REALLY ground. when not hooked to shore power bonded neutral/ground at the generator has cases that would protect you, others that won't. So it's a "crapshoot". I have a "bonding" plug for my generator, but usually just bypass my EMS when hooked to the generator.