Wenatchee and Chelan Real Estate Home Inspections- Manufactured Homes Service Conductors

As part of my home inspection service I see a fair number of manufactured homes.

Manufactured homes electrical service installations vary from the typical home service feed in that there will be a pedestal that is physically outside the home is considered the main service panel.  Why this is important to know is this is the only place in a residential service where the Neutral and Grounding busses can be bonded. All panels downstream from this are considered distribution panels or commonly referred to as sub-panels.

This means from the point where the service conductors (feeders) leave the pedestal (main panel) and connect to the panel in the home has to be a 4 wire configuration. Two- Hot conductors, one neutral (grounded conductor) and one grounding conductor.

                                             (Note that the neutral and ground busses are separate)

According to the terminology in the NEC, the "grounding" conductor is for the safety ground, i.e., the green or bare or green with a yellow stripe wire.  The word "neutral" is the white when you have a circuit with more than one "hot" wire.  Since the white wire is connected to neutral and the grounding conductor inside the main panel, the proper term is "grounded conductor".  However, the potential confusion between "grounded conductor" and "grounding conductor" can lead to potentially lethal mistakes - you should never use the bare wire as a "grounded conductor" or white wire as the "grounding conductor", even though they are connected together in the panel.

Another very important thing is that those feeder conductors are properly protected. As you can see these are not.

Wenatchee and Chelan Real Estate Home Inspections- Manufactured Homes Service Conductors

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