OT it looks like two outlets in one of my rooms arent grounded

[griffin8r]

Originally Posted by EmporerEJ

You seem to have jumped the shark here.....

We started out with a missing GROUND. Now you are talking about a missing Ground AND a missing neutral.

If there is a missing neutral, I'd run, not walk away from that line. And in most cases, nothing would work.

So, all your arguments about the missing neutral make your statements invalid.
The Ground is the BACKUP for the neutral.....as I'm sure I said in several previous posts.
I'm not sure anything will take a lightning strike. If you are concerned about a lightning strike, make sure you have a rod on top the house, and make sure you are behind a Power transformer without a lot of open wire between you and it.
But the odds of a lightning strike are......well, the odds of a lightning strike.
If you actually get struck by lightning, on your line, your "surge strip" isn't gonna take it, no matter what size wire you have going to ground.

OK....

We need to get back to the fundamentals of a 3-prong outlet and what exactly "ground" is.

In a three-prong outlet, one side is positive, the other side is negative, and the hole in the middle is the ground (also known as the neutral, because it carries no current other than what is shunted to it by the circuitry in an overload)

The reason why that middle hole is considered the "ground" is because there is no ground connection on the negative side of the outlet - that's completing the circuit to and from the electrical supply outside. The neutral pole actually does connect to a true ground drilled into the soil outside of your house near the meter.

When a power strip reports that there is no "ground" on your circuit, it means there's no connection to that neutral plug, which means there's no way to shunt.

I'm not sure where you are on this science, or where we're not making a connection (pardon the pun) in our discussion, but this is all pretty much wiring 101.

Positive/Negative/Neutral(ground) is what I learned back in Journeyman electrical classes 20 years ago.

As to your assertion about lightning striking, I'm not talking about direct lightning strikes. Even minor surges add up in any device with a Metallic Oxide Varistor (MOV) based surge suppression system. The Joule rating on surge suppressors and UPS systems alike is the lifetime maximum amount of surge that MOV will successfully shunt before it fries and defeats any further current flow to the rest of the system - this is PERMANENT - as in, unless you feel lively enough to go in there and replace the MOV yourself, you're going to have to buy a new surge suppressor or UPS box.

If you're lucky (or smart) enough to buy a power conditioner that utilizes Series Mode Suppression, you don't have that problem, because there's no varistor involved, it's a direct shunt to ground of the excess power until it reaches a certain max current, at which point a circuit breaker built into the box will trip and merely need to be reset.