Speedy
What is your point. What are your suggestions for mjr or is it your intention to show people how smart you are.
Normally I don't reply to stupid statements like this, but I will give you the benefit of the doubt.
No, that is not my intent. My intent is clear up myths and erroneous information people give out.
I believe in 1956 it was pretty common to ground the main to incoming water lines when water lines were steel. When people hooked fans and things t6hey looked around for the nearest ground they could find and it was often copper pipe and no it wasn't code but it worked.
Really, it worked? How can you be sure?
It WAS code for a while to ground to water pipes. This is when ALL water pipes were metallic and workmanship was something to be proud of.
It has not been allowed to simply ground to a water pipe for many years now except under certain circumstances. Even then it is only allowed within the first 5' of where a pipe enters the house. I can provide the code text if you like.
The allowance was removed from the code because people were getting hurt and killed and houses were burning down due to fault current doing some very bad things on it's way back to the source. High resistance connections, joints and pipe sections create a LOT of heat. Also, broken pipe runs and open joints create breaks in the current path causing sections of pipe to become live with voltage.
The suggesting to ground to a cast vent stack is absolutely absurd.
To your point about the balance that the gfi uses to trigger. Is there any way it will be out of balance with out ground being involved,
Yes.
...whether it be the copper wire or the water you are standing in. With that said the gfi would protect you without a ground wire but you could not test it.
You could not externally test it, but the internal test button DOES work. Just ask anyone who has a compliant installation of an ungrounded GFI where a home inspector has flagged it as a defect, simply because his little plug-in tester did not work.