groundreceptaclescrews
I have a contractor come in to do some tile work and he had taken out some GFCI outlets. I think he must have used a power drill to loosen the screws and one of the green, ground screw fell off. It would not go back in. Now I have 2 GFCI outlets with no ground.
It seems the screw is supposed to screw in a small plate inside the outlet, like a screw into a nut. As the screw is completely off, it is not connected to anything. Is there a way to fix that?
Misusing ground as neutral is a code violation. It's the work of a hack electrician trying to get a job across the finish line, or other tradesman who severed a neutral by accident and hacked it so no one would notice.
I would search each receptacle box in that circuit for a reason for a neutral problem. Most wiring problems are at terminations. If you find none, I would find the next box back on the cable run (that is still hot), and disconnect the cable there. Whatever broke the neutral may have also nicked the hot.
If the electrician did this, then every connection in your house needs review. You know how to do receptacles!
Here's what's actually going on inside those 3-light testers.
You see there is a neon light between each of the prongs. The red is between neutral and ground for instance. The problem is, neon lights are not voltmeters. They will light for a wide variety of voltages, and won't tell you which voltage except very subtly by brightness.
When they wrote the descriptions for the device, they were forced to come up with something for every light combination. They were optimised for the kind of mistakes seen in new construction... and so they're misleading and wrong when troubleshooting old work. They're so horrible I call them "Magic 8-ball testers"*. The testers are much improved by tearing the sticker completely off, and learning to interpret the raw data the lights are providing.
For instnace, a broken neutral with a load on the circuit turned on. Neutral is pulled up to 120V, so the outer lights light. Interpretation: "Hot Ground Reverse" (unlikely). We've had novices waste hours trying to chase that nonexistent fault.
If the green/ground wire is connected to neutral in any way, That Is Bad. That is often done by incompetent hacks to try to work around a problem, typically one they created.
I suspect that somewhere upstream, the neutral wire is broken. The previous hack decided to bootleg neutral from the ground wire, which is why he crossed them.
Generally, wiring problems are at terminations, and every one of those should be accessible. However every once in awhile you have a problem with the wires proper, e.g. someone drives a nail through a misplaced piece of Romex.
* Amusingly, the randomly assigned Imgur URL for this is 0BSoD.jpg. I couldn't make that up...
Best Answer
I managed to fix it!
It seems there is also a little hole for Push-In ground wire and meant to be tighten with screw. The push-in hole gave me an opportunity. I first line up the inside and outside holes by gently shaking the receptacle. And then I insert a needle, in-lieu of the ground wire, through the push-in hole to apply pressure to the small holed plate from the inside. Finally, I screw in the screw. Good as new!