what's going on my friends this is dustin selzer with electrician you
today we are going to answer the question what is a neutral
so there are a couple of different ways that we can look at a neutral and in code uh for the
longest time a neutral is just called a grounded conductor you would hear things like the neutral
point in a system but they didn't really go by neutral and most of this book they call it the
grounded conductor which is confusing because there's an ungrounded conductor and there's
a grounding conductor so when they talk about grounding a lot of the times as an electrician
you think they're talking about the ground but they're actually talking about the neutral and
they're calling it the grounded conductor so the first thing i think is a good idea is to look at
article 100 of the national electric code we're in the 2020 code book what do they consider a neutral
more specifically neutral conductor it says the conductor connected to the neutral point of a
system that is intended to carry current under normal conditions so it's a conductor connected
to the neutral point of a system so if we're going to talk about the neutral point let's say from our
utility company we've got these conductors that come in right we're up in a utility transformer
inside of a transformer you know you've got your two incoming wires
and then you've got a coil of wire essentially uh that is your primary
side so i'm going to call this p for primary then our secondary side let's say that we've got
less uh less of those windings right so our primary voltage will just say we're at
7200 volts and on our secondary side we'll just say that we have 240 volts well in this system
that's still just two different hots and two different hots here right so we're just taking
and inducing a voltage into the secondary but there's no neutral that's like run in with here
that like traverses over and jumps over to here so usually at our electrical service we generate
a neutral so what we call the neutral point is a point in the system where we tap off of
so let's say in the middle of this coil we tap this in the exact center and we come out with a
conductor well if there's 240 between our two hots then we've got 120 between each hot and neutral
but still 240 between them so this is what we would call the neutral point so again
code says that the neutral conductor is a conductor connected to the neutral point of
the system that is intended to carry current under normal conditions so they are intending
for this conductor to carry current so if we've got loads on this say we've got like a light bulb
that's connected we're going to be going from this would actually be backwards the the bottom would
be where the hot comes in the neutral would be where the shell is we're just conceptualizing this
here so don't get like crazy about the details so we would have current flowing back and forth
60 times a second on this and say over here we've got like a microwave
right like we got a little cord that goes here and uh out of that cord we're tapped into the
neutral so we would have some current that's going from hot to neutral here and some current that's
going hot to neutral here they're going to be in reverse order because if the if the current is
pulling back and forth on the 240 volt system there's going to be some current that's going
this direction and some current that's going this direction the whole time so that's why
the currents in the neutral balance out so if say our light bulb if we had like two amps
flowing on this 120 volt side through the light bulb but we've got 10 amps flowing through this
circuit going through the microwave then we have an imbalance that's happening so the neutral is
always going to carry whatever that imbalance is because again we have some going in and some
going out so we have to subtract those things so we would end up having eight amps of current
traveling on that neutral conductor the neutral can really just be thought of as the same thing
as the two hots it's just another conductor that gives us half of that voltage so instead of you
having a full 220 volt or 240 volt circuit now you have two smaller 120 volt circuits so really you
can kind of think of it as an ungrounded conductor it's just or a hot but it's just that we're not
we've attached it to the neutral point so we call it a neutral so the reason that we call it
a grounded conductor is this conductor is actually intentionally grounded it's intentionally brought
to earth so we are able to call it a different thing we call it the grounded conductor while
neither of these would be considered grounded they are the ungrounded conductors so that's why
we have hot neutral underground and grounded now a ground ding conductor is a completely different
thing we'll get into that a little bit more at a later time but any kind of circuits that we have
that we run to things we always have a ground that goes over to our system we call it an equipment
grounding conductor at our service we have a thing called a grounding electrode conductor
which is a conductor that goes to an electrode in the earth which is also grounding the system
but that's where these terms get kind of confusing so let's just
understand what a neutral is it's really just another ungrounded conductor but it
is intentionally grounded so we call it the grounded conductor in code
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