Saying there's "nothing wrong" when there are obvious, serious hardware issues and a UPS that won't stop beeping is like saying "well there's no law that my tires can't be bald, so I'll keep driving because there's nothing wrong"
I do not think the situation is the same. I believe GFCI gives excellent protection against shock even if the ground is faulty and the neutral is floating with respect to earth. (Nevertheless, I still want my home to have properly grounded three-pin sockets, even if it is implausible that it will ever make a difference.)
I hope an expert can chime in, but I suspect a 'spicy' trackpad would trigger GFCI.
GFCI at the breaker should have the ground tied to neutral, and still have grounds on the outlets (tied back to the GFCI at the breaker). Current through the ground pins will trip the GFCI, rendering the system safe. Since the ground pin should be bonded to any exposed metal (e.g. aluminum laptop case) a fault leading to a "spicy touchpad" should instead shut off the entire circuit at the breaker.
Just slapping a GFCI in without that bonding won't do anything though. The ground would be floating, and thus wouldn't ever trip the GFCI. There would be no path through the GFCI for the fault current to take, making the system just as dangerous as having an ungrounded conductive case.
A "double insulated" system has non-conductive material for the case of the electrical device and only needs a two-pin polarized plug. A fault of live to case won't cause danger, because the case is an insulator. A fault of live to neutral will just blow the device's internal fuse (or trip the breaker if the device has no fuse, but the breaker is just to protect the romex wiring in the walls so the device could well be on fire by that time).
> The ground would be floating, and thus wouldn't ever trip the GFCI. There would be no path through the GFCI for the fault current to take, making the system just as dangerous as having an ungrounded conductive case.
GFCI works by detecting an imbalance of current on the intended path - i.e. between live and neutral. For an ungrounded conductive case to create a electrocution risk, there must be an alternative pathway through the user's body and a potential difference to create a current on that pathway. Whenever these conditions occur, there will be a live-neutral imbalance which will trip the GFCI before any harm is done. In contrast, with an ungrounded conductive case and no GFCI, if a fault creates a situation where electrocution is possible, the only thing that could protect the victim is the circuit breaker, but the breaker must allow sufficient current for normal use, which is well above the threshold for lethality.
I highly, highly recommend you read up on electrical theory. When you're done go de-energize a system, disconnect the ground on a GFCI outlet, then connect the live of that GFCI to whatever piece of random material you have. Or lay it on the ground directly. When you re-energize the system, the GFCI will trip or it is bad.
If a GFCI was dependent on a device being grounded it'd be no better than a regular 3 prong outlet. We'd also have to ban 2-prong devices, which are probably most devices in a US home at this point.
There is actually a weird way to work around that. If you stand on an insulated sheet (like a clean plastic cutting board) you wouldn't have a path to ground. If you cut open one current carrying conductor of the cord and put yourself in-series a GFCI wouldn't trip in that case. Current would still flow through the device. Enough to hurt you, but probably not enough to turn it on for most devices like a lamp.
As you can guess, such an accident is nearly impossible even in the case of someone cutting through a cord accidentally.
Indeed - and an electric chair will kill even if it is both properly grounded and plugged into a GFCI socket capable of handling the current (aside: do electric chairs have UL certification? I doubt it, but the states in which it is still nominally an option presumably want the operators to be safe.)
If you are put / put yourself into the normal current path (such as while working on the innards of plugged-in and switched-on equipment), you are just the load (or part of it), and neither GFCI nor previous protection schemes will help you.
A GFCI device does not care about the presence of a ground current -- at least not directly. GFCI measures a current imbalance between hot and neutral; if there is such an imbalance, it disconnects the circuit (i.e. it trips).
It's true that any such imbalance is most likely to flow through the ground of the GFCI's own Romex cable and for that reason it's best for GFCI circuits to be grounded. But an ungrounded GFCI will also trip if its hot current finds another path through ground, such as through a water pipe, because that current will not be returning through the GFCI's neutral and it will thus create an imbalance.
My apologies: I completely agree that there was definitely something wrong with OP's situation. I misunderstood your response, and thought you were objecting to KMnO4's claim that you can have a safe two-wire (no ground wire) scenario if you use GFCI.
It’s weird and unnatural, but there’s nothing inherently wrong.