John Grabowski wrote:

Pigtail the receptacles instead of feeding through each device for
less maintenance down the road.

I am not sure what pigtailing the receptacles means. I know about
pigtailing the grounds (which I learned here on this newsgroup), but
I am not sure about what pigtailing the receptacles means.

*You just splice your feed-through wires together and then splice
jumpers onto those to feed your receptacles. That way the full load
of the circuit is not going through the receptacle. This causes the
receptacle terminations to be less affected by heat which can cause
loosening of the termination screws. Also if there is a problem with
one receptacle it does not affect the ones downstream.

Thanks. That makes sense. Since I use 12-gauge wire, it is sometimes
hard getting all of the wires and the receptacle back into the boxes. I
guess doing the pigtailing adds maybe two more wires in the box, but I'll
have to try it that way to see how that works in terms of getting
everything back into the boxes.


*Deeper boxes will help with pushing the wires back in. On jobs where I use
all #12 I sometimes use stranded wires for the pigtails. That makes it very
easy to push the devices into the box, but I have rolls of stranded on my
truck already. It may not be worth your while to buy some stranded unless
you get a good deal on short rolls at Home Depot.