Master Betty wrote:
"Shaffer" wrote in message
...
Had a guy come in to help put up wood moulding in the kitchen. Must have
hit a wire becaue it blew a breaker.
He pulled the nail out (small nail) and hammered it in elsewhere. Flipped
the breaker back on. Said don't worry about it.

Now I lie awake at night fearing its a fire hazard.

Is it?


Chances are nothing will happen but it's possible you could have a short
there. It happened to me. A problem could occur if you have two appliances
plugged into the same circuit and they complete the circuit. If you had two
guitar players or mics in the same circuit and the musicians touched it
could be deadly. You need to open the wall up. Pull the wire out. Cut it and
splice it back together in a control box. Sorry for the bad news but there
is a potential problem. BTW: the same thing happened to me. I destroyed a
computer when I plugged it into a printer on a different outlet.



We had damaged wiring in our condo when the upstairs neighbor nailed
flooring through the conduit. The guy seemed to play dumb, denied using
power nailer. There were two breaker trips while nailing, but the power
was on when the breaker was reset. Third time was the charm - no power
after resetting the breaker. To make a long story short, the final nail
caused the copper wire to burn through entirely. After the wire on the
circuit was replaced, we got the old wire to keep for posterity. There
were numerous nicks in the insulation that exposed bare copper. Some of
the nicks also had black char marks around them on the insulation. Our
condo board, as usual, got ****y about paying and we had two
electricians involved. The electrician who did the final work said that
the conduit was too close to the floor above and was a code violation.

FWIW, isn't it normal to nail molding to the studs? Any reason not to?
Don't know the best practice on that, but a conversation with the
contractor might convince him to open the wall and make the needed
repair to the wall if wiring is bad.