How safe is this and should I change it?

Question

I just finished building a project in my house to automate two plugs I installed on the top of my table, but due to laziness I left the ground connections outside the junction box like in the image:

For the purpose of the image I left the junction box open as you can see, but that's of course closed during normal circumstances.

My question is if I should spend time on routing my grounds to the junction box, or if it is OK to just leave it like this.

In case you need this extra info: I live in Europe and our standard is 220 V at 50 Hz.

Answer 1

So, a small child is playing underneath your table and manages to disconnect one of the earth wires to your newly fitted appliance outlets. Can anybody be aware that this has happened?

Not very likely so, you have now lost the 1st-line of defence against faulty appliances and, if an appliance (later-on) develops a live to chassis fault, you will have a dangerous situation that may be remedied by GCFIs or RCBs on your main electrical box. Do you want to take that risk: -

Note the red highlighted words from THE RCD HANDBOOK, BEAMA GUIDE TO THE SELECTION AND APPLICATION OF RESIDUAL CURRENT DEVICES 4RCDs5. You lose earth and your first line of defence against electric shock is lost. So, you need to protect your earth wires from unintentional dislodgement.

Answer 2

There are several unsafe practices in the image:

• It is hard to tell from the image, but it appears the ground wire going into the junction box may be wired together with the neutral wires. This is extremely dangerous if the mains supply comes through a plug that could be reversed. Even if permanently wired it is not permitted and hampers GFCI protection.
• Lack of strain relief / pull protection on all cables. Even just a zip-tie would be an improvement.
• Single-insulated phase & neutral wires going to Sonoff boxes. They are quite vulnerable to damage, and only have one thin insulation layer on them.

The ground wire connector is also vulnerable to damage due to lack of strain relief.

Answer 3

Should be okay. After all, ground is meant to be connected to things like exposed metal enclosures on equipment. Even ESD wrist straps plug into ground.

Certainly it is more vulnerable to modification from someone tampering with it so if that was a concern then it shouldn't be done. But otherwise I don't see an issue.

Answer 4

You should fix it.

I admit that protective earth wires are usually safe to touch. But in my opinion, there's a big problem with this installation, which is that (no offense!) it looks like sloppy work.

In general, best practice is to do things in such a way that safe things look safe and hazardous things look hazardous. If you have something that looks safe, but is actually hazardous, that's an obvious problem. But if you have something looks hazardous, but is actually safe, that's also a problem, because now you have to keep track of which of the hazardous-looking things in your environment really are hazardous, and which ones are safe. That's a bad situation to be in.

The rule "if there's a wire connector outside of a junction box, then it's a potential hazard that needs to be fixed" is a good rule to follow. So follow it.