Can you get a friendly sparky to do an electrical survey on your house wiring?
If someone connected the sockets the wrong way round what else might they may have done. Stay safe pal 
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Listen to the majority, get someone qualified to have a look if you can.
The reversed polarity should not make one difference in the operation of the light, the driver acts independent of the wall receptacle.
I would be more concerned with the open ground.
You shouldn’t get ANY shock from ANY properly wired device EVER, unless your fingers are where they shouldn’t be.
That’s a straight up malfunction.
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Don’t worry, we’ll help you with your testing once your meter comes in.
We can also discuss some of the other points members are bringing up which are important, as well, after that.
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The driver and the light ‘should’ both prevent this kind of shock hazard even if the hot/neutral are reversed.
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Meanwell drivers reference their ground to the return and it’s quite possible most other manufacturers do likewise. If you connect the live feed to the return (neutral) on such a device the drivers casework will become live at mains voltage and so will anything it’s attached to including the lamps casing and you if you touch it. If you scroll down to the connection diagram in this pdf you will see what i mean. It might make more sense to say the return (neutral) and earth are the same thing 
HLG-185H-SPEC.PDF (218.3 KB)
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Meanwell drivers reference their ground to the return and it’s quite possible most other manufacturers do likewise. If you connect the live feed to the return (neutral) on such a device the drivers casework will become live at mains voltage and so will anything it’s attached to including the lamps casing and you if you touch it. If you scroll down to the connection diagram in this pdf you will see what i mean. It might make more sense to say the return (neutral) and earth are the same thing 
HLG-185H-SPEC.PDF (218.3 KB)
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In the U.S., the return and neutral are always the same thing. Inside the main circuit breaker/fuse panel box in every home, the neutral and ground wires are connected to the same buss. Thats national code.
I may be wrong on this, its been many years since I did electrical work, but I was under the impression that all consumer devices were required to have built-in protection against reversed hot/neutral.
If the device has two a two prong plug, there is zero connection to any metal parts that you can touch. Everything is supposed to be 100% isolated, so it makes no difference which way the plug is wired.
With a three prong plug, if the hot neutral are reversed, it should blow the breaker or fuse instantly. The hot will be grounded as soon as you plug it in.
Oh, wait - the only way to not blow the breaker would be if the ground was open and the hot/neutral were reversed - which sounds like they could be in this situation.
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For reference:
Chassis (unpainted surface on the fixture housing):
Earth Ground:
Or (nearby household water pipe if copper, remove any corrosion):
Don’t touch metal with fingers for safety while doing this.
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And / or, if there is leakage it may not pop the breaker. E.g. low current / low AC. It looks like a low power load at the breaker.
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If his home wiring is as bad as it sounds, they may not have bonded the copper pipes or done a proper earth ground, or the bonding wires may have failed - corroded, broken etc… If thats the case, he may get a zero reading even if there is leakage.
I would recommend using the ground lug on a socket as you showed above - after testing with his hand held tester to be sure its wired correctly.
Good point!
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I’ll have to sit down an take a look at the pdf later this evening. Working right now until about 6 or 7. And thanks for sending it.
In the U.S., the return and neutral are always the same thing. Inside the main circuit breaker/fuse panel box in every home, the neutral and ground wires are connected to the same buss. Thats national code.
I may be wrong on this, its been many years since I did electrical work, but I was under the impression that all consumer devices were required to have built-in protection against reversed hot/neutral.
If the device has two a two prong plug, there is zero connection to any metal parts that you can touch. Everything is supposed to be 100% isolated, so it makes no difference which way the plug is wired.
With a three prong plug, if the hot neutral are reversed, it should blow the breaker or fuse instantly. The hot will be grounded as soon as you plug it in.
Oh, wait - the only way to not blow the breaker would be if the ground was open and the hot/neutral were reversed - which sounds like they could be in this situation.
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We have an independent earth system here in the UK so the only place the return and earth can become common is inside a consumer device. All 2 wire appliances must be double insulated so need to have a plastic case. All metal case appliances must have a 3 wire connection so their casework is independently grounded at all times. We have 240v domestic mains here so i’m very glad of that.
These drivers have their return connected to case ground via a capacitor which is probably for RF suppression purposes but it could still pass a high voltage to earth in a case of crossed mains polarity. Not much protection if you screw up then eh 
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Unfortunately this home does not have copper pipes. The old galvanized is what’s installed.
Your home must have an earthing point though right? you need to find it and measure the resistance between it and the appliance earth to check if your earth circuit is in decent condition.
You can do this by yourself but unless you are fairly well versed in electrics i strongly advise a survey by a qualified electrician. It wont take long and is not usually expensive but it could save lives
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This is an interesting concept to explore. They are the same thing, and they are not at the same time. There is also a difference between grounding and bonding.
The same code states that bonding happens at one and only one location, which is at the main distribution panel. The intent is to avoid ground loops - current traveling through the ground between several points of the building.
The term “grounding” can refer to a number of ground-related systems
Many systems are indeed both grounded and bonded. Any wye- transformer (or split-phase 120/240 transformer, like what we seen in USA and Canada) would be — the neutral pulled off the centre tap will be bonded to building ground at that transformer. In fact, this neutral is the neutral that comes into the service entrance panel at the residence. This is bonding.
Bonding of the neutral gives us a voltage reference to ground, and also makes for a return path to the transformer, in the event of a ground fault. In an ideal situation a system could work without this bond, but should one phase experience a ground fault, the other two would experience a significant voltage spike which may take out their respective loads. So basically all wye-secondaries (and split-phase) are bonded. The purpose of this bonding is functional with respect to the electrical system.
Now to the systems fed by delta- transformers (industrial mainly), which do not have a centre tap, instead only three phases are supplied. Loads connected to the system draw from the potential difference between the phases, as opposed from the potential difference between a phase and neutral, so there actually is nothing to bond, no neutral is tapped, no reference needed. No bonding, because it would add no functionality.
Either way though, there must be a means to return power to earth in case of a malfunction — so that the structure of the machine/load/lamp is not energized. If that happens, a human may accidentally provide a connection from the energized device to the ground, and get zapped (as happened to the OP) or killed in the process. This is grounding. The purpose of grounding is human safety.
From this perspective of safety, all systems and services are supposed to be earthed to protect from ground fault, regardless of how the power is distributed to them. The systems that provide a neutral connection for single-phase loads are also bonded. All are supposed to be grounded in one way or another. They both might lead to the same grounding plate, or they might not.
It is my strong belief that since we have power electronics, transformers, and moisture in the same space; the safety grounding is of paramount importance, before any other troubleshooting of leaking currents.
Just my $0.02
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There is only one possibility of getting a shock from the light chassis, and that’s hot to ground or hot directly to chassis itself (also ground).
Most internal wiring of electronics is stranded wire other than solder, and sometimes a few strands go astray and have the possibility of touching the ground or chassis, or their is a nick in the conductors somewhere from the panel to said receptacle.
As well, a screw could be pinching a wire just enough or a connector may be too tight.
It’s obviously not a dead short because the breaker would have tripped or you would have had a fire.
You can also forget about everything from the load side of the driver as then it becomes a DC circuit.
With all that being said, if the receptacle in question is NOT on a dedicated circuit, the problem could be somewhere else up or downstream from that receptacle or a device attached to it.
The problem can also be on another circuit if their happen to be multiple circuits running into the same junction box or if it’s on a 3 wire circuit with a shared neutral.
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It’s probably the timer folks. If the timer is off and the lights are still on, there is the issue. He said they turn off when unplugged. I’m not saying he doesnt have other issues, but the timer is still in question.
The shock is likely lack of ground to the chassis. Maybe he doesnt have a real ground?
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Way to bring us back to earth @ReikoX 
…but the grounds, THE GROUNDS!!!
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Yes please fix the potential electrical shock. 
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Your no doubt correct about the timer bro. Those lightweight contacts arc and burn up badly over time and can end up partially closed and still passing a low current when they are supposed to be open. The device can still be live just at a lower power which explains the dim lights.
Maybe his timer didn’t like getting it’s polarity crossed but he still shouldn’t get a shock, unless it’s partially shorting out to earth internally
Bad earthing is still the most lightly culprit imo
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That would be the the worse case scenario. We can not discount that. But it is not the only way. There are other ways that an AC voltage can appear on the chassis without the hot being tied directly to the chassis. Not necessarily line voltage AC but an AC voltage of reduced magnitude (and limited current capability).
I don’t disagree that this shouldn’t be occurring in modern designs. It could be a fault or it could be a design flaw. Ground referenced supplies can, apparently, have this problem. I would imagine that they happen to be simpler and cheaper to manufacture.
Maybe. Don’t know what kind of electromechanical switch we are talking about here. But AlwaysLearnin had discovered that the neutral / line at the outlet were reversed. If we are talking about a mechanical timer, which conductor is the switch acting on? The line (hot), the neutral, or both? My guess is that it is designed to switch only the line.
Since the the line/neutral were reversed, the timer was opening the neutral. This leaves the line voltage connected to the lamp. And, it’s now floating hot (internally) without a neutral anywhere to be found. The only return path is leakage to ground (or other bad scenarios).
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