jJim McLaughlin wrote:

Joseph wrote:

I need to tap some electrical in an underground garage where my car
is. There are no wall outlet whatsoever and sometimes I need to plug
in some hand tools. Anyway, I found this box hanging off the low
ceiling, I opened and saw thew 5 wires, 4 wiht shield and 1 just
barecopper(ground). Can someone in the know please tell me which of
these wires I can splice into to get teh equivalent household voltage
of 120V, I plan to add a wall socket to it. I promise I will be
careful, where gloves etc. Thx



I forgot to mention, here are the pictures of the wires, I suspect
Red=120V and black=Ground, white=Neutral? What the other one for? I
have auto-ranging digital multimeter that can do AC measurements. I
should just measure across Red & Black to see what I get?

http://www.geocities.com/corvette_2050/connector1.JPG
http://www.geocities.com/corvette_2050/connector2.JPG



Odd photos.

All appear to come into the box in an armored cable. Looks sort of BX ish,
but the BX I know is black, white and bare copper ground, if there is a
ground.
Old code sometimes allowed BX armored sheath as a ground.
It wasnt a good ground as the amored sheah could corrode, break, and
then no ground.

In photos of the box are insilated wires in black, red, blue, white
with a red tracer thread, and a bare copper.

The bare copper is grounded to the box with a screw.

In US household wiring, conventional wisdom would suspect black and
red being separate 120 hot legs; blue is also used in conduit as a third
color for a hot leg. Its also used *inside* a fluorescent fixture or
one of
the high frequency legs.

A plain white *should be* a neutral.
What a white with a red tracer thread is I have no idea.

I wouldn't touch this with a 10 foot pole.

Looking closer at those photos, the white has both red and blue tracer
threads
on the insulation jacket. Very wierd.