ele. short

I have ele. short on one side of my mobile home when you touch the screen door frame and the lite switch cover screw you get a shock and the same in the bed room switch cover screw there on the same circuit thanks Doug

 

Could be a number of different things.

• Static electricity? Stand in the same spot and see if you can get shocked twice in a row without moving between. If not, it may just be a static electricity shock.
• Improper grounding? If someone bootlegged a ground by interconnecting the neutral and ground connections, this can sometimes cause this. If someone connected grounding to an improper spot, such as a plumbing pipe, this can also cause this.
• High-impedence connection between a hot wire and a ground source. This could be very dangerous.

I suggest you get a qualified person out to evaluate. It might be nothing, but it might be very dangerous.

 

You may have a combination problem of a hot wire shorted to ground AND an open ground in the circuit which is not allowing the ground path back to the panel to be completed. Determine what all is on the circuit and then inspect the wiring to see if a ground wire (bare copper) has become disconnected (come out of a wirenut, broken at stakoned joint, etc.) If you lose the path back to the panel, and you have a short circuit situation your breaker will not trip but anything metal connected to the location of the short will become energized (i.e switch yokes and plate screws that are connected to the yokes which are connected to the ground wiring). By touching the metal screen door which is connected to the metal mobile home which is connected to the ground you create a path for the current to flow when you touch the plate screws and the door at the same time. If you can take a tester and reader 120 volts between the plate screw and the door then this is probably your case.

I ran into a similar situation one time in a older house that didn't have ground wiring (2 wire receptacles on two wire cables). An extra 3-way switch had been added with new cable which included a bare ground wire. The ground wire was connected to the new switches in this part of the circuit. One of the switches was installed into a shallow (metal) wiremold box and when it was a hot wire became pinched and was making contact with metal. The metal parts of the new circuitry (wiremold, wiremold boxes, switch yokes, plate screws - even the plate screws on the other end where the switch was installed in a plastic box in a sheetrock wall) became energized and therefore a shock hazard because there was no path back to the panel to trip the breaker.

 

Sounds like grounded neutral.

 

Like John said, a bootleg is certainly a possibility. Are most of the recepts in the house 2 prong or 3 prong?