NEC 680 bonding

Bonding is the single most important electrical detail on a pool, and it is the thing most often done wrong. The idea is that every conductive surface within five feet of the water — rebar, rails, pump housings, ladder anchors, and the water itself — has to be tied to the same electrical potential. When they all sit at the same potential, current has no reason to travel through a swimmer to find ground.

Bad bonding doesn't show up at inspection. It shows up in ten years, when a pump housing corrodes, a bond wire parts, and somebody feels a tingle in the water. That's why we treat bonding as its own line item on every job.

On new pools, we tie the bonding grid to the rebar before the concrete goes down and we document what we did. On retrofits, we trace the existing bonding with a megger and an AC voltmeter and we tell you what's missing. Fixing bad bonding on an existing pool is often less expensive than people expect, and it is always cheaper than the alternative.