Bonding in commercial catering kitchen

From a strictly electrical point of view, I agree that bonding is most unlikely to be needed, and neither is earthing required unless the table includes built in electrical equipment. And if such equipment IS built in, then then the table is arguably part of a class one appliance.

This does not however tell the whole story. Earthing or bonding of metal tables is often required in publicly funded facilities. It may serve no electrical purpose, but if the elfansafety requires it, then so be it. "you cant have too much safety"  The need for such bonding or earthing is now an established part of elfansafety folklore.

And inspecting for a bit of green and yellow wire is a nice easy tick.

A bit like 2 meters between phases, or only blue "safety" cable to be used outdoors, or only  extension leads with "safety" fuses to be used, or self contained emergency lights tp be wired in MICC.

From a strictly electrical point of view, I agree that bonding is most unlikely to be needed, and neither is earthing required unless the table includes built in electrical equipment. And if such equipment IS built in, then then the table is arguably part of a class one appliance.

This does not however tell the whole story. Earthing or bonding of metal tables is often required in publicly funded facilities. It may serve no electrical purpose, but if the elfansafety requires it, then so be it. "you cant have too much safety"  The need for such bonding or earthing is now an established part of elfansafety folklore.

And inspecting for a bit of green and yellow wire is a nice easy tick.

A bit like 2 meters between phases, or only blue "safety" cable to be used outdoors, or only  extension leads with "safety" fuses to be used, or self contained emergency lights tp be wired in MICC.

But the bonding of large stainless steel tables and other large objects in a wet floored steamy kitchen may actually distribute dangerous fault Voltages around the "joint." (Excuse the pun). I consider it best to leave steel furniture just floating and not connected to the installation wiring in any way. But, by ek we did used to bond everything in the past. The bonding cables often used to come loose and disconnected after much bashing in the commercial kitchen so served no purpose anyway. And the earth labels used to cut kitchen staff's hands when they were stowing away kitchen equipment on low shelves.

Z.