georgestolz said:
I have to say, such a new basement containing ungrounded receptacles sounds very odd. Someone would have to go out of their way not to ground the receptacles.
My house was built in the 60's with only a few circuits grounded. The previous owners remodeled much in 1985. They added grounding type receptacles and used wire with an equipment ground. The problem is, this wire was just connected to the metal boxes on circuits that used old NM with no grounding wire. So everything appeared grounded, but it isn't.
The house still had some of the old two prong receptacles. Before I bought it, I pulled the covers off those and saw a ground wire. Amazingly, those ground wires were good (so they got new 3 prong receptacles). I also checked some random 3-prong receptacles with a 3 light tester. They all tested good. It wasn't until later that I discovered some of the ungrounded wire segments in the upstairs bedrooms. These are going to be difficult to get a grounding wire to, but some day I'll get to it.
So its not hard to get ungrounded receptacles if the house was originally wired before grounding was fully required. The rewire in 1985 was done by idiots -- they didn't know which wire should go to the brass screw, many grounds were just twisted, two separate circuits got interconnected, wires were wrapped counter clockwise around screws, #14 and #12 wires were mixed (at least they were all 15A circuits), there were 20 receptacles on one circuit with a 10 amp fridge on the last one, there is some poly water pipe buried at 6" containing regular NM cable for a branch circuit to an outbuilding (and surprisingly that circuit still works fine even with the GFCI I added to protect it), etc.
