Every scenario you describe can be found in this house... it's pretty bad...
Bonding to all three galvanized pipes, the two drains and the vent, clears every thing to 0.0 volts and 0.0 amps.
I should have realized that the current was very small (if any) since I didn't get even the smallest spark when I touched the bond wire to the pipe.
The rewire is a definite, and they want me to do it. I also saved his truck from burning up due to a really bad CD player wiring job, he was on the phone with Crutchfield tech support when I showed up...
Someone had decided to use coax to feed the power to the CD player, hot in the core, ground on the shielding. The source to ground was wrapping of the stripped coax around a screw and tightening it with the poor little core getting squished inside... Then the insulated core goes on to the battery hot terminal sans fuse... Sheesh!
I discovered it when sparks started to fly while tracing the origin of the wire while figuring things out for him. (The problem being an "open" at the same location... his tester wouldn't budge...)
To make a long story even longer... He was very grateful...
But back to the topic:
I've left the temporary bonding wire in place until the rewire coming up in about a month. I've told him to call immediately if the fuse blows or if the shocking returns.
Other than that, the "fixing" of the problem would be to rewire it, one bad outlet at a time until it goes away, and by then I'll have rewired the whole thing anyway, so they may as well get an estimate and a reasonable time schedule to do it in.
There's no problem in "selling" a rewire to them, they want it done anyway.
But am I OK leaving it as such in the meantime?
[This message has been edited by sparky66wv (edited 08-26-2001).]
