110 Volt Interior Outlet Ground Circuit

[billford]

I was checking my interior 110 volt outlet, the one behind the center console that faces the rear seat, with a circuit tester you use for testing house wiring. The tester shows that there is no ground circuit.

 

I looked inside the outlet with a flashlight, I can see the hot and neutral terminals but there is no ground terminal.

 

I checked the wiring diagram, it shows it has 2 wires for the led and 2 wires for the hot and neutral. There is no ground, the receptacle just has an empty hole.

 

I'm not an electrician, but would this be dangerous? Or even illegal?

 

House wiring would not pass with no ground, do cars with 110 volt outlets fall under some other category?

[GrySql]

The wiring diagram shows the Hot and Neutral ( and the LED light) coming from the Direct Current/Alternating Current (DC/AC) Inverter.

That DC/AC Inverter is grounded.

The actual 110v plug in the car has the generic H/N/G setup but the wiring diagram only shows the outlet as a two-prong H/N plug.

I suppose because the DC/AC Inverter is set to Ground there is no need for the Outlet to have one, that's my best guess.

[corncobs]

Nothing wrong with it at least IMO. How would you find "ground" in a car anyway? Your are sitting on four very good isolators - your tires.

 

They could / should have made a connection between N and G which is what's done at home or just use a two prong outlet.

 

Second would create a huge issue when trying to plug in a laptop power supply which most often than not have 3 prongs.

In addition to that it's only rated 150W (correct me if I'm wrong) and I can't think of any device that has 150W or less and metal parts that could short to hot.

Edited November 23, 2014 by corncobs

[murphy]

It's 150 watts and no motors are allowed. It has a very distorted waveform, a sine wave it is not, that will not work with anything that requires 60 Hz sine wave power. It's limited to devices that rectify the AC to DC such as a laptop.

[Easy Rider]

 

I'm not an electrician, but would this be dangerous? Or even illegal?

 

House wiring would not pass with no ground, do cars with 110 volt outlets fall under some other category?

 

This is a different animal.

Commercial AC uses earth ground as one side of the circuit (common).

In a vehicle, doing that would actually be somewhat dangerous.

It is not a problem.

Commercial AC could be done that way too but it would require BILLIONS of miles of extra cable in the distribution system.