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hi youtubers jeff cote here with another session on ask pys so we've got a question of a fellow boater who says jeff i've seen a huge amount of questions misinformation regarding the electrical part of my boat they confuse the neutral with the negative and with the grounding it would be great if you could explain who's who and when and cannot and when they cannot be linked together all right if you're not confused about grounds then you're probably not reading or listening because grounds are honestly one of the most confusing part about marine electrical systems it took me a long time to figure it out so grounds are multiple things there's a lot of grounds on our boat so let's start naming them there's ac grounds dc grounds rf grounds lightning grounds bonding grounds all those grounds are basically common meaning they're connected to one another and that's very important you cannot have different grounds that are floating okay so they need to be common and that's where the you the term common ground comes from so all these grounds have to be connected together to be at the same potential i.e common and so you're going to have an ac ground on your boat the dc ground which is pretty common on most of us right a lot of our boats have ac and dc and it's very essential when we do surveys these electrical audits on boats we're always looking making sure there's a ground tie between the dc ground and the ac ground of the boat same thing with the bonding a lot of boats have bonding systems all these through halls on the boat all these underwater metals they're all connected together but you've got to make sure that that bonding system is also common to the dc ground and the ac ground a neutral and this was one of the questions here a neutral is also tied to ground now it's not tied permanently it's always tied at the source of power so for instance when you're connected to shore power you're going to actually have the ground ac ground and the neutral are going to be tied together at the source of power at the transformer of the dock if you don't if you have a generator again same thing the neutral and the ac ground are tied together at the source of power because the ac grounding or the green wire needs to go back to the source and if you have an inverter your inverter and it's a marine inverter is actually going to do a ground tie between the ac neutral and the ac ground whenever your inverter is working so that's the concept on ac grounds and ac neutrals

when you look at these marine diagrams and we've got all these conceptual diagrams on our website they have an ideal boat certainly the american boat yacht console abyc has this sort of perfect boat this boat that i've yet to see or will ever see where all these grounds are going on this one common ground bar most of us don't have that and when i say most of us i mean like 99.999 of us do not have a common ground point what generally happens is the dc ground on our boat is the common and everything gets connected back to that and so a lot of boat builders will use the dc they'll ground that and they'll have all the other grounds connected back to this dc distribution so that's why it's confusing is because the theory is never really applied in reality the way that we would see it in the standards or in the schematics and that's what's so hard for all of us is we're trying to map what we're told should happen and what actually happens on a boat and we've got videos on grounds by the way i could do a video on grounds that could last two hours i bore most of you but it is very interesting because it's so freaking complicated thank you for watching this pys video if you've got further questions ask them down below or go on our website to fill one of the forms don't forget to subscribe and thanks for watching