Re: Copper thieves - Missing neutral
1. There may well be no seperate earth. Likely the cabling is PME (protective multiple earth) where the neutral is tied to earth at regular intervals and is used as the earth return.
2. Provided the phases are balanced (identical loads) there will be nothing whatsoever happening in the neutral. In practice that's almost never the case of course, but the currents should be orders of magnitude less than the phases. Also the neutral will be at about earth potential, so "safe"* to hanlle in a live system. For PME the multiple earth bonding required will probably mean that the mass of earth will quite happily take the residual current.
* For pikey definitions of "safe". Just hope a phase doesn't drop out eg because a digger hunks up a cable oranother bunch of pikeys cuts the wrong cable or gets greedy and tries to nick the lot at the same time.
As an aside, I remember when I was working at Macaroni Comms at Writtle we had an intermittant camp behind the site. The council decided to stick a couple of heavy timber posts in to deter access. They did decide to plant 'em deep. Anyways, about four feet down the engineering team found a salt glazed pipe in the way...
Cue large digging spike. <<FLASH>>.(11 kV). He survived. Power went out at some point and the site went over to genny. Over lunch I went out to have a look. There were burn marks at the top of the hole and below, but no spike. Apparently he went back down to retreive the spike cue <<FLASH>> and the loss of power. He survived again.
Darwin is cruel sometimes.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
