Purpose of Equipotential Bonding

Purpose of Equipotential bonding

Purpose and Practice
Equipotential bonding is essentially an electrical connection maintaining various exposed
conductive parts and extraneous conductive parts at substantially the same potential.
An earthed equipotential zone is one within which exposed conductive parts and extraneous
conductive parts are maintained at substantially the same potential by bonding, such as that,
under fault conditions, the difference in potential between simultaneously accessible exposed
and extraneous conductive parts will not cause electric shock.
Bonding is the practice of connecting all accessible metalwork whether associated with the
electrical installation (known as exposed metalwork) or not (extraneous metalwork) to the
system earth.

Lightning equipotential bonding

In a building, there are typically a number of services other than electrical supply that employ
metallic connections in their design. These include water piping, gas piping, HVAC ducting, and
so on. A building may also contain steel structures in its construction. We have seen earlier in
this chapter that when an earth fault takes place in an installation, the external conducting
surfaces of the installation and the earth mass in the vicinity may attain higher potential with
reference to the source earth.
There is thus a possibility that a dangerous potential may develop between the conducting
parts of non-electrical systems including building structures and the external conducting parts
of electrical installations as well as the surrounding earth.
This may give rise to undesirable current flow through paths that are not normally designed to
carry current (such as joints in building structures) and also cause hazardous situations of
indirect shock.
It is therefore necessary that all such parts are bonded to the electrical service earth point of
the building to ensure safety of occupants. This is called equipotential bonding.
There are two aspects to equipotential bonding: the main bonding where services enter the
building and supplementary bonding within rooms, particularly kitchens and bathrooms.
Main bonding should interconnect the incoming gas, water and electricity service where these
are metallic but can be omitted where the services are run in plastic, as is frequently the case
nowadays. Internally, bonding should link any items, which are likely to be at earth potential or

which may become live in the event of a fault and which are sufficiently large that they can
contact a significant part of the body or can be gripped.
Small parts, other than those likely to be gripped, are ignored because the instinctive reaction
to a shock is muscular contraction, which will break the circuit.