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hi youtubers jeff cote here with another  session on ask pys  so we've got a question of a power well  actually a cell motor  selber 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