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| When you used the word 'probably' |
being defensive: My 'tone' seems to offend some and all too often (it seems) they start playing one-upsmanship and go on a crusade to find fault or flaw. So the caveats, conditions, and other such stuff are for them.
You should see 0v between unconnected leads but stray capacitance and even your own body as an antenna can create points where voltages can be measured with a high impedance voltmeter. You can often test for live circuits with one of those neon bulb testers by holding one terminal in your fingers and probing the wiring with the other- Not enough current to feel but enough voltage to fire the neon.
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Why not bond the neutral & ground at the generator so it would be like shore power hookups? Would that then require grounding of the generator?
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Again, leave the earth ground out of it. That is not necessary. Don't confuse earth ground with the chassis ground or frame of reference.
As long as the genset has no problem with it, it is a good idea to connect the neutral and chassis or frame ground together if you are not connected to anything else.
If you are plugged into shore power and do not have a transfer switch, then the neutral and ground are connected at the shore power service point and ground checking things will work as intended.
If you are not connected to shore power but running AC off a genset, then you might connect the neutral and chassis ground yourself - if the genset manual says it is OK. I worry a bit about the inverter electronics but I'd guess they should handle this with no problem.
For gensets with plugs (e.g. the Honda 2000i) the neutral to chassis connection is not necessary except to make a test device happy. Even for wired in gensets like in my B-Van with a transfer switch, the test devices are left to complain (saves one pole on the switch, I guess). In either case, an earth ground is not needed either for the test device nor for any other reason.