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Should my cable wire be grounded?

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Redmoon

Member
So gaf, I recently moved into a new house, and while it's been great, we have been having electrical issues. To make a long story short, we have both a breaker box and a fuse box, and believe the fuse box is causing a short or something which is giving us our electricity problems. We have someone coming to fix, or see what's wrong to fix it.

Anyway. I decided I wanted to move my cable modem (I have Comcast) to an outlet that has power so I can at least get internet. However, the moment I touched the metal nut to unscrew it from the box, I got electrically shocked. Couldn't let go as my hand tensed up and had to use my body to pull my hand off. Thought this was because of our electrical issue so I just passed it off as that and didn't touch the cable again.

However when we went to go outside to flip breakers, we noticed the grey box for Comcast was opened so I took a peek inside from curiosity. I saw that there was a 2way connector for the cable coming from the poll to the house that was attached to a grounding wire, but nothing was connected to it, it was bypassed and went directly to a 2 way splitter instead, so nothing was grounded. I don't know much about this stuff (electricity/grounding) but I'd assume this cable needs to be grounded to bleed off the rouge current that's on the line, which may have been why I got shocked.

I'm thinking of just fixing this myself while taking proper care, as I don't really want to make a scene of anything Reguardless of what happened, but I want to know if these lines are normally needed to be grounded to prevent shock. I know grounding is used to bypass things like lightning strikes so I assume this is a pretty big issue.

Thanks.
 

ColdPizza

Banned
Yes. This is something Time Warner does regularly where the drop comes into the house or apartment.

edit: Give them a call and tell them it needs to be grounded and that you were electrocuted.
 

Icefire1424

Member
Yes, the exterior coaxial cable (drop) should be grounded. Unlike telephone line, coax isn't powered, but it can carry a charge if one is present from another source.
 

iamblades

Member
Yes. This is something Time Warner does regularly where the drop comes into the house or apartment.

edit: Give them a call and tell them it needs to be grounded and that you were electrocuted.



I highly doubt that, unless corpses are posting on had now.
 

Redmoon

Member
Well we got the wire fixed. No more unpleasant surprises :). Though the tech was mad about it.

And kinda unrelated, but since it started the whole thing, got the power fixed. Was apparently an open neutral up on the pole. Hope it's smooth sailing from here on in :)

Thanks all.
 

ColdPizza

Banned
Well we got the wire fixed. No more unpleasant surprises :). Though the tech was mad about it.

And kinda unrelated, but since it started the whole thing, got the power fixed. Was apparently an open neutral up on the pole. Hope it's smooth sailing from here on in :)

Thanks all.

Why was the tech mad?
 
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