Neutral Vs Ground Bus Bar

In an entrance panel both bus bars are grounded to the box.

Neutral vs ground bus bar. Thank you for your question regarding the separation of the ground bar from the neutral bar in an electrical sub panel it is our pleasure to help. The problem primarily comes from the inappropriately named neutral wire. The neutral is isolated from the metal enclosure. Ground bus bar some service panels have a separate bus bar for ground wire connections instead of a neutral ground bus.

A double tapped neutral is when more than one neutral wire is fed into a single screw terminal on the neutral bus bar in the main electric panel. In this case the ground bus is electrically connected to the neutral bus in main service panels only. As the neutral point of an electrical supply system is often connected to earth ground ground and neutral are closely related. Current carried on a grounding conductor can result in objectionable or dangerous voltages appearing on equipment enclosures.

Personally i prefer to put them on separate buss bars usually there is one on each side of the box also while not specified in the codes i will never put both the white and ground wires under the same screw. You can see this clearly in the picture below as there are multiple neutral wires feeding into a single screw in more than one instance in this spaghetti mess of wires. In any distribution panel there are individual bars for each termination. Under certain conditions a conductor used to connect to a system neutral is also used for grounding earthing of equipment and structures.

In subpanels the ground bus and neutral bus are not connected to each other. It is true that according to code if it is your entrance or main panel you can put neutral and ground wires on the same bus. Ground is therefore universal reference which is always taken to be zero potential. The difference between a ground wire and neutral wire is often misunderstood.