Neutral Vs Ground Bus Bar

Personally i prefer to put them on separate buss bars usually there is one on each side of the box also while not specified in the codes i will never put both the white and ground wires under the same screw.

Neutral vs ground bus bar.

Current carried on a grounding conductor can result in objectionable or dangerous voltages appearing on equipment enclosures. The ground buss is in direct contact with the metal enclosure. It is true that according to code if it is your entrance or main panel you can put neutral and ground wires on the same bus. As the neutral point of an electrical supply system is often connected to earth ground ground and neutral are closely related.

You can see this clearly in the picture below as there are multiple neutral wires feeding into a single screw in more than one instance in this spaghetti mess of wires. The neutral is isolated from the metal enclosure. The difference between a ground wire and neutral wire is often misunderstood. In subpanels the ground bus and neutral bus are not connected to each other.

Neutral is provided by the power company to make the path of electricity closed. Ground is therefore universal reference which is always taken to be zero potential. A double tapped neutral is when more than one neutral wire is fed into a single screw terminal on the neutral bus bar in the main electric panel. In an entrance panel both bus bars are grounded to the box.

Under certain conditions a conductor used to connect to a system neutral is also used for grounding earthing of equipment and structures. The problem primarily comes from the inappropriately named neutral wire. Thank you for your question regarding the separation of the ground bar from the neutral bar in an electrical sub panel it is our pleasure to help. In this case the ground bus is electrically connected to the neutral bus in main service panels only.