Electrical questions (or, I don't THINK I cut a wire)

[NovaSaber]

I cut something outside without taking a good look at it first. When I looked afterward, it really was a vine like I'd assumed, with thorns and everything.

But I woke up really worried, especially after I remembered there's a green cord inside whose purpose I didn't know (I remembered after tracing its ends, also it is entirely inside so at least that's one thing I ruled out definitively enough to stop worrying about), and looked up "green wire outside house" and...

The old standard color for ground wire insulation in the US is green? (I think modern is "green with yellow stripe", which looks more obviously artificial.)

And I know other people have accidentally cut those, including while doing lawn or garden work.

I went out and checked again. Still no sign of having cut anything that wasn't plant material, so I'm pretty sure I don't actually have a problem.

This was also over 20 feet from the actual ground wire, which appears to be bare copper and also go straight into the ground?
And I don't seem to have an above-ground grounding rod anywhere?

But I'm just too worried to sleep.

And I've got questions that I can't seem to find answers to with search engines.

Would basic garden clippers have been able to cut through a copper wire so easily if it had been that? (I think I would have at least noticed the difference.)

What would it look like on the inside if that had been what it was? Multiple strands of copper, right? Or at least definitely copper-colored?

What would be the signs if I had cut the ground wire? Would it be obvious like anything ceasing to work entirely, or would there just be danger I wasn't noticing until something went wrong?

And why was green ever the standard color for any sort of outdoor electrical thing?
How is that not going to make them more easily mistaken for vines?

 

[Haywire]

Well, I'm more of a 12-volt vehicle technician than a 110 volt house tech, but 110 uses 3 wires: hot (usually black), neutral (usually white), and ground (green or bare copper).

Depending on how sharp your garden clippers are, they may have been able to cut through copper wire, but the green plastic sheath is covering copper wire. House wiring is usually solid, not stranded, but it would be noticeably copper inside. Probably 1/8-inch copper core. And you would have felt a significant resistance to cutting through wire compared to the usual vines.

If you have a pocket knife, try slicing through the stuff you cut at an angle. If it's wire, the insulation will come off but the copper core will stop a pocket knife. If the knife cuts through the whole thing, then it's just vine.

As to what kind of symptoms to look for if you have a ground issue, I'm not really sure. Probably, things like TVs or computers would not work correctly, but I'm not trained in such things. Nor do I know WHY green was the color they chose. It may have been as simple as "white and black are already in use, what other color do we have?"

 

[Pocket]

So, here's what I've been able to dig up. First off, if you're worried that you cut the master ground wire that all the green wires inside your walls go into, you didn't. Despite the name, those wires actually lead back to the big fat cable that connects your house to the grid via the circuit breaker. The "actual ground wire" 20 feet away sounds like it's part of a grounding electrode system, which has something to do with preventing a buildup of static electricity in the metal parts of the house, I think? None of the links I found are explaining it very well because they're written for professional electricians, but here's a page that has diagrams on it. At any rate I'm not sure why that's exposed to outside air either, when it should be able to just go through a hole in the foundation or even the floor.