> I have to redo my bathroom and this old house is wired with 2 wire
> plugs
> everywhere and no grounds. Plans are to rewire the house someday in the
> not distant future but right now termites have me doing the bath. I was
> thinking of re-wiring the bathroom while there is no drywall on it with
> 3-prong plugs. Can I run the ground wire to one of the many water lines
> in
> that wall and at least get a ground so I can legally put in 3prong plugs
> ? At the same I can run romex up to the attic to I can do a proper 3 wire
> when we redo the rest of the house wiring later this year but I thought
> maybe by going to a water pipe I could avoid pulling that drywall off
> later.
Pretty much, no.
It wouldn't be a reliable ground, as already mentioned...
However, one of the basic tenets of recent electrical wiring is that
all the conductors have to run together. It limits the possibility of
some part of the circuit becoming disconnected independently.
(like the old knob and tube wiring where the wires took separate
paths, so one wire could fall off somewhere and cause electrical
problems all over a whole house... as appliances try to find ground
paths through each other...)
A bit more unlikely, but imagine one day you replace a section of your
plumbing to add a tee or something, and use a non-metallic fitting.
Then that ground would be off, but there is no way the plumber or
handyman doing the job would realize that his plumbing work might
possibly cause an electrical danger in some other random room of the
house.
That's sort of the logic behind the code.... you can't risk a larger
circuit by making a local modification.
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