"H_X" wrote in message
...
I am working on my son's 100+ year old house, and someone put in a gas
furnace. It works fine.

I am helping him install a new large closet, but when we went to move
an old lighting fixture out of the way, we cam across a bunch of wires
in a box above it. The thing about the wire, is that within the
bundle of white wires, one of the white wires was hot. Again, this
was connected to all the other white wires in the box.

I was suspicious of that wire, so we left it out of the group of other
white wires.

We later on noticed that the furnace was not working.

Shaking my head, I reattached the "hot white" to the other white...and
the furnace went on.

It gets wierder from here.

I am assuming that a qualified electrician wired the house, and made
the black wires hot. There appears to be some evidence of that.
Nevertheless, I am hooking up a socket, and when I did it did not
work. In fact, the White wire is hot on that circuit too. I suspect
the white wire I put back into the mass of wires has electrified the
entire house's white.

Any ideas what the heck is going on?

Thanks.
H

It sounds like you removed a neutral conductor from a pack of neutral wires.
If there is a load on that circuit, it will appear that that isolated wire
is hot, when it is a return in search of it's neutral