Life without a white neutral wire for a subpanel

[dewick]

Gentlemen… I will try to make this as brief as possible... here's the background of my issue, years ago we bought property and built a detached garage on . Later on we build a house and the electrician installed a 200 amp service for the NEW house panel. the electrician ran all 200 Amps to the house and a sub feed back to the detached garage with a 50 amp (2 wire) 240 V breaker. he did not install a neutral back to the sub panel from the new house. The detached garage sub-panel, which used to be the main panel, is properly grounded with number #6 copper and is connected to an outside ground rod. EXISTING LOADS: My detached garage has a small 240 V compressor, 4-120 V breakers for lights, receptacles, gate & carport. A TOTAL OF 4-120 V BREAKERS FROM 15 TO 20 Amps. All the existing white neutral wires and their grounds are connected to one bus bar, which is connected to the ground rod wire. There is no ground bus bar present.
Last week I installed a small 4 circuit transfer switch next to the sub-panel in the detached garage. I have not yet connected the green ground wire from the transfer switch to the sub-panel bus bar, but I plan to.
QUESTION: is this safe? The detached garage is about 100 feet away from the house and would be pretty hard to run a separate neutral. I reside in Washington state.
Thank you for your input. It is appreciated.
Dennis

 

[Dennis Alwon]

Please try diychatroom.com

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