Existential Angst wrote:

But here's some weird/funny stuff I encountered.

1. During the demo, I inadvertently cut a bx cable, an edison circuit.
Would normally not be a problem, except the "red" had so faded that it is
sort of indistinguishable from the white, ie, both appear tan/beige.
Worse, I don't really know what these wires control, as the house was wired
in a helter-skelter fashion, where one fuse would control a hodge-podge of
outlets/lites.

How do I sleuth this out? It seems to me, for the time being, it would be
best to keep both presumed hots on the same leg for now. Nothing is
blowing so far.


When all the other electric is reconnected find what is not powered. If
everything is powered I would probably leave the circuits disconnected.

If you find a receptacle, for example, is not powered plug-in a lamp
that is turned on. Connect the known hot to power. One of the other
wires may light the bulb if connected to the neutral bar. If not the
receptacle is probably is on the 2nd hot wire. In that case I might pull
the receptacle and if one wire is clearly a neutral check continuity to
the wires in the panel.

If you connect wires to power connect them to the same fuse/breaker.
(That may be what you did.) That covers trader's concern.


2. While unloading the fuse panel of its neutrals (first I'd remove the hot
from the fuse, then the corresponding neutral), my main temporary neutral
connection to one fuse panel became undone, unbeknownst to me.

As I unloaded the circuit neutral (hot already removed), there was still
arcing. I'm assuming that with the main neutral removed, this neutral was
carrying return current from *other* hots, with the current eventually
making its way to ground (btw, these bx cables don't have a ground wire).
Ergo, arcing from other hots?

Is this to be expected, with a main neutral removed?


If the hot is disconnected (or both hots for an Edison ckt) there
shouldn't be a significant spark when you disconnect the neutral. (There
could be a tiny spark from capacitive currents.)


3. With a non-edison circuit (one hot/neutral) controlling a few
lites/outlets in the kitchen, and all wires separated in a junction box from
a demo'd wall, I noticed on separating out the old mess that I could get an
outlet and lite to go in series, ie, both would dim.

I can readily see how this would happen in an edison circuit with a lifted
neutral (in which both lites etc would be normal OR one dim and the other
too brite), but I haven't been able to sketch out how, with just one hot,
parts of the circuit would wind up being in series.

Is this normal with a lifted local neutral? Or does this indicate a
fundamental wiring problem? How to sleuth?


I don't know how you get that with just one hot and the corresponding
neutral connected. For an Edison ckt with a lifted neutral, the light
and outlet could be on the same hot wire and something else could be
getting bright. I assume you fixed the floating neutral bar in #2 before
this occurred.

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bud--