MaryCatSimmons Posted February 1, 2021 Report Share Posted February 1, 2021 I bought a used Cress kiln, fired it once--all okay... BUT the cord had been electrically taped to the plug and I was nervous about firing it again like that. I asked an electrician doing some other electrical work to please repair this plug/cord issue. When he took the electrical tape off, discovered that the ground wire had been cut. I'm having him fix it up right. BUT...WHY would anyone cut a ground wire to a kiln? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
neilestrick Posted February 1, 2021 Report Share Posted February 1, 2021 12 minutes ago, MaryCatSimmons said: BUT...WHY would anyone cut a ground wire to a kiln? People who don't know anything about electricity do all sorts of stupid things. I see a lot of really bad, really dangerous things done to kilns, and it's pretty much all done out of ignorance and/or laziness. Cut the ground wire and the kiln still works, so it must not be important, right? Lots of things can be done incorrectly that don't necessarily affect the functioning of the kiln, but they're dangerous under certain circumstances, and that's why they shouldn't be done. You could use a kiln for 30 years and never need the ground wire, or you could need it today when something goes wrong in the control box. One thing I've learned from 20 years of working on kilns is that you should never trust that the person before you did things properly. My favorite horror story is when I was working on a kiln, and had turned off the power at the disconnect box on the wall, but found that the power was still on. I opened the disconnect box and found that the wires had never been hooked up to the disconnect- they just went around the switch, right through the box and out to the kiln! I regularly run into kilns where someone has used a 3 phase plug on a single phase kiln, leaving one lead unhooked. It works fine, but it makes more work for me because I then have to open up the kiln control box and see what's going on since the plug doesn't match with the information on the serial plate. Laziness in the construction trades pretty much always translates to more work for the next guy. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bill Kielb Posted February 1, 2021 Report Share Posted February 1, 2021 Maybe they didn’t understand what they were doing. I hope it’s connected properly inside the kiln. I would double check. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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