Fixing Ungrounded Outlets Without Rewiring - Janitor Method

There is a little grey adapter in a drawer somewhere in your house. Three holes on the front, two prongs on the back, and a metal tab that goes under the cover plate screw. Read the package it came in. It says it lets a three prong plug connect to a grounded two prong outlet. Grounded. That one word is a condition, not a description, and if your outlet is not grounded, that tab is not doing a thing. I was the janitor at one public school for forty years, head custodian if you were filling out a form, in a building from 1954. I ran film projectors off those outlets, then VCRs, then the computers in the library, and nobody was rewiring that place for me. I was never an electrician. What I learned was which corners you can cut and which ones cut back. Five things in this film. The first one costs you nothing but a look. Three holes do not mean grounded. What tells you something is the year the house was built, and whether there is a small sticker that says No Equipment Ground. The electrical code requires it when the job is done correctly. Almost nobody applies it. The second one costs six dollars. The plug-in tester with three lights. Buy one. But the safety standard those testers are built to says, in its own text, that they are not meant to judge the quality of a ground. There is one wiring shortcut that makes an ungrounded outlet read perfectly correct, and the tester cannot see it. The third is that grey adapter, and I give it a fairer hearing than the internet does, because there is one kind of house where it really works. You can check which house you have with a flashlight in the basement. The fourth is the fix every electrician will tell you to do, what it protects, and what it does not. It protects you. It does not protect your television. The fifth is three jobs that belong to somebody else, and one that belongs to you tonight. The heater season starts now, and November through March accounts for nearly half of home fires from electrical equipment. #HomeMaintenance #OldHouseWiring #Homestead