AC outlets - 60 volts on hot and neutral?

[scottiedoo]

Hello, I wanted to check and get anyone that is a bit more knowledgable with electrical to shed some light (pun intended) on my discovery. I have used the AC outlets a handful of times. Recently when we had our power outage I tried using two microwaves, one showed some kind of error code and would not start heating, the other worked but made some odd sounds and now with our house power it has some issues that might be caused by the truck.

Out of curiosity, I used my outlet tester that you use to check for proper writing and it showed the hot and neutral were reversed. So I got out my multimeter and checked the voltage between the hot, neutral, and ground. The voltage between the hot and neutral was 120 volts (approx), but when between the hot and ground was 60 volts and same goes between the neutral and ground.

This had me puzzled and not sure if this is normal or how these type of dc/ac conversions work or what? Would this cause any electrical problems with ac appliances (microwaves?). I know there is some inherit issues in houses that have a reverse hot/neutral with things like switches that could shock someone, but this is a bit different.

Any one have info or is there something wrong with my outlets?

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[Davethadog]

This is the same thing that happens when you have no ground which is kind of true.

 

[CrazyOne]

I have a high level understanding of the why. But is it dangerous?

 

[SwampNut]

I can't imagine how voltage on the neutral could damage anything. The appliance shouldn't be using it, the connection is just there for safety. It should be voltage with no real potential (hah) meaning it would just go to 0 on any load. I haven't tested mine however.

 

[IGR]

I haven’t tested mine but this behavior is similar to what I have observed from cheap inverters. In theory this shouldn’t hurt anything but some electronics might complain.
Generally it’s a sign of low cost inverter.

 

[Zoidz]

This is common and normal in inverters made for mobile power. It's called a "floating ground". The neutral and ground are not bonded together for safety, under the presumption that you could get a shock if you touched the hot wire and the body of the vehicle if neutral was connected to ground. With the neutral floating from ground, your body does not make a return path from hot to the inverter neutral.

Some load devices expect the neutral and ground to be bonded and get flaky if they are not. Sounds like the issue with your microwave.

If you Google "inverter floating ground" you'll get a kazillion results, some discussing the exact 60 volt measurements you observed.

 

[scottiedoo]

This is common and normal in inverters made for mobile power. It's called a "floating ground". The neutral and ground are not bonded together for safety, under the presumption that you could get a shock if you touched the hot wire and the body of the vehicle if neutral was connected to ground. With the neutral floating from ground, your body does not make a return path from hot to the inverter neutral.

Some load devices expect the neutral and ground to be bonded and get flaky if they are not. Sounds like the issue with your microwave.

If you Google "inverter floating ground" you'll get a kazillion results, some discussing the exact 60 volt measurements you observed.

Thanks for your help. I am doing some reading and it will take me a bit to fully grasp all these concepts.

So if I understand correctly so far, the truck doesn't have a true earth ground because there is no connection from the inverter to the earth (obviously) and they didn't both the neutral to the ground. The truck from what I read in other posts is it has a gfci if it detects current on the ground for some safety.

I'll keep reading some more but I feel it would be nice to have some tech from Rivian explain a bit more about what the do's and don'ts with these outlets as I read people trying to backfeed them into their house during an outage and thats a whole other topic.

 

[NY_Rob]

..I'll keep reading some more but I feel it would be nice to have some tech from Rivian explain a bit more about what the do's and don'ts with these outlets as I read people trying to backfeed them into their house during an outage and thats a whole other topic.

The advice and explanations you get here is more accurate then you'd likely get from a Rivian Tech.

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