"Doobielicious" wrote in message
news:f0l3k.640$L03.193@edtnps92...
OK. My electrician has 1 feed for one of my bedrooms and a couple plugs in
hallway. The feed coming from my basement to my 2nd story has a short.
They
think the drywall or siding guys screwed into the wire. The circuit was
tripping so what he did was tied the neutral white wire into the breaker
and
then tied the black into the neutral bar of my panel. All works
plugs/lights
work. I caught this before and asked why he put the black on the neutral
bar
and the neutral wire on the breaker. He said he had a short somewhere and
did that to find where the problem is.


Like I said everything works in my hallway and bedroom so I am thinking he
reversed his wiring to make things work. So what it appears to me is that
the black wire is hitting the ground wire form when someone screwed the
drywall or siding.

If, in fact, that is the problem, it is not much different than the fact
that the neutral and ground still end up on the same bar in the panel. He
effectively just change the color of the wire.

The problems though, is that if lights are on that wire, the switch is no
longer breaking the hot, but breaking the neutral. Problem number two is
that you just don't know if the black is just hitting the ground. It may be
screwed through and into something else, such as a copper line that can
become the ground. The screw may have also broken or severely damaged the
black wire. I'd want the real problem found and fixed.