Your ground wires should never do that dude. I could see the "hot" wire cooking like that, but not the ground. That's an odd one.
I am the guy too. My work involves a lot of mechanical/electrical stuff. The controls are just the last part to make it all actually work. Example. At the NOAA headquarters in Silver Spring MD, we're re-fitting their chiller plants to all new and improved joker products controls. Part of it is about 33 different 16" control valves for the chiller system. Each valve is 120 VAC powered, being switched open or closed also with 120 VAC. So we run the conduit from the valves to a separate relay panel that I built. Pull the wire from the valves to our relays, then run the control cabling from the relay panel back to our central control panel (which we also custom build on jobs this size). Then, I program the controllers, and pass it off to the nerds for the final integration (for the spinning wheels and changing colors that end customers love to see). I'll throw some pics up at some point. On another thread of course. I'd just hate to derail this one.