Inspected a house built in 1956 yesterday. Found the usual electrical issues such as missing GFCIs, reverse polarity receptacles, and such. After noticing a couple 2 prong receptacles in the last bedroom, I decided to double back and start removing cover plates in all of the rooms. I found many bootleg grounds all over the house and in the garage.
Sometimes it pays to go beyond the NACHI SOP during an inspection…
A couple examples:
Were there bare grounds in the panel?
What was the wiring method? Was it NM cable without an EGC or was it armored cable?
@mfellman yes. They were from newer NM cables used in an addition. They were in a ground bus in the panel, but there was no grounding conductor that went to the outside to a ground rod that I could find. The panel did not appear to be bonded and the main disconnect was outside the house at the meter. It was a 60 AMP service.
@rmeier2 the older part of the house and garage had braided cloth cabling with only hot and neutral wires, no ground wire. An addition on the house had modern NM cables with a bare ground wire. Some of the j-boxes were metal, some were plastic.
That must have been fun pushing the outlet back into the metal box
I try to see the bootleg with just the cover off. In the last 45 days, I’ve found bootlegs in two houses. But like you, sometimes, I have to pull the outlet to see what’s going on.
It was like playing that ol’ board game Operation 
That was a good catch. You sometimes have to wonder about what is going through peoples minds when they do that.
Money…They can’t easily find new 2-prong outlets or don’t want to pay the price. Rewiring or adding GFCI protection is too much trouble and of course, money. So they do the quick and easy and cheapest thing.
Don’t know south of here but in Canada but we are allowed to put a GFCI receptacle at the start of a chain of receptacles which will protect all those down the line without grounds and just neutrals. Placard the downstream as GFCI PROTECTED and the AHJ will accept it.
Should use the “no equipment ground” stickers that come with the GFIs. People are then protected but not all equipment.
Ditto here.
I agree that would be better. But here we are allowed the sticker I mentioned and have commonly seen it in some renos. Plus used the same technique in my renovation company when the client really didn’t want to gut the house to fix the wiring.
When you look in the panel and see cables with no grounds and three wire outlets and they test grounded chances are it’s a bootleg ground.
Not necessarily. Type AC cable with the bond strip uses the sheath as the EGC and would have a grounding means to allow 3 prong receptacles.
That why I asked what type of the wiring method was used. I could envision AC and the see Harry homeowner install the bootleg jumper when you don’t even need one.
I should have explained more… there should be both stickers - “GFI Protected” & “No Equipment Ground”. IIRC, they both come in the packs of GFIs. Of course, in practice, the number of times I’ve seen it done right are the low single-digits in 20+ years.
It also always makes me laugh in that you could pick 100 people at random and the chances of a single one of them having a clue what an equipment ground is are VERY low 
Maybe they’ll Google it while waiting in line to replace their TV that just got fried
On a 100-year-old fixer-upper that I did 8-9 years ago, we had conduit and a little AC, so we were able to easily go to grounded 3-prong outlets. We have a great display at the HOH in Boulder demonstrating most of the wiring mistakes made on outlets.
Ive seen that quite often in old homes around here with AC. Problem is that the 3 prong replacement receptacles do not have a bonding jumper to the box and the guy changing out the devices didn’t know anything about self-grounding receptacles.
