If your home was built before the 1960s, you might still have some old two-prong ungrounded outlets. The correct name for an ungrounded outlet is a non-grounding-type receptacle. So here, we'll ...

If you have an older home, you may have outlets with slots for two prongs instead of three. The list of electrical outlets most commonly found in a modern house doesn't include two-prong outlets ...

That's why it's generally safe to plug a two-prong plug into a three-prong outlet: those plugs are designed to work safely even without a grounding slot. Still, grounding matters for some devices.

I recently bought a new home and it still has many old 2 prong outlets (built in 1948). When I use a circuit tester it shows the outlets are grounded. As you would assume, due to the age of the ...

The apartment I will be moving into on Wednesday has three-prong receptacles in all the rooms. My GFI receptacle tester ($5 from the hardware store) tells me that most of these receptacles have an ...

To ground the outlet, a bare copper wire needs to be attached to the box; this wire now gets connected to the grounding terminal on a three prong outlet (see photo below right). (The Minnesota ...

Some outlets are installed upside down, but the three prongs still serve the same purpose.Other outlets — especially older ones — only have two slots and can only fit two-prong plugs. Some ...