Importance of grounded outlet?

[dr.girlfriend]

We have a 1950's house.  Every place we've renovated has grounded outlets, but the original house still has two-prong outlets in many ares.  We are putting a desk set-up in the dormer nook in our bedroom.  We had an electrician out to change out the outlet and he wanted to charge us $250 just to "diagnose" the problem and other couple of hundred or MORE to change the outlet, in addition to his $69 fee.  It just didn't seem worth it to me.  I do have a two-to three-prong plug converter, with the metal part screwed in.  But the outlet itself doesn't have any ground wire connected to the screw or anything.  How important is this, if I have a surge protector power strip plugged in to the converter?  Am I running the risk of something shorting out or catching on fire, or what?

[sakura]

If you have metal boxes and the wire coming into the box has a metal coating, it acts as a ground, so screwing the 2-3 prong adapter into the outlet through the cover, into the metal box will ground it. You can buy an outlet tester (<$10) to see if it’s properly grounded. If there’s a GFCI outlet on the same circuit it can offer protection from shock.

[boiler717]

That seems really pricey. I think it depends on what you want to plug in there.
When we bought our house we had 7 ungrounded outlets. We installed GFCIs in the bathroom, bedroom, and office. It’s important to note that those just help prevent short-circuiting and do not protect the object being plugged in from damage. We left some 2-prongs in the entry way and dining room where we didn’t anticipate needing 3-prong plugs.

[aprilsails]

Yeah you could just wire in a GFCI which would provide short circuit to ground protection. I would also use a power bar for any electronics to provide additional protection. GFCIs are not that hard to install and cost about $50 last time I checked so this is a pretty easy DIY fix to the problem.

The converter isn’t as safe as the GFCI outlet. Electrical issues like this have a poorly defined risk profile. As in it could be fine for another 50 years, but there could also be a problem tomorrow. Electricity is just fun like that.