On May 29, 9:25*am, "
wrote:
On May 29, 3:21*am, Evan wrote:



On May 28, 5:08*pm, Ziggs wrote:

When the hair dryer is on, our 15AMP circuit breaker has been tripping
lately to the bathroom's outlet. *Sometimes my wife sees a tiny flash
when the power to the outlet goes out. *I just looked at the outlet
and it's a 20amp GFCI on the 15AMP circuit breaker. *I just looked at
the three neutral wires on the other side of the pigtail and they are
melted.

So, here are a copy of questions

1. Should I replace the outlet with a 15AMP GFIC instead of the 20AMP?
2. Can I just cut back the wires that are melted and put in a new
pigtail or should the wires coming into the outlet box be inspected or
possible *replaced?

@Ziggs:

What else besides the bathroom is connected to the 15amp
circuit in question which "nuisance trips" whenever you use a
hair dryer in the bathroom ? *There has to be a lot more on
that circuit than just the bathroom if the neutral wires "melted"...

Melting is more typically caused by a poor connection
that has some resistance. * That resistance produces
heat.

Clearly you have never seen a catastrophic overload condition
applied to undersized wiring...

The sort of thing where an improperly wired Edison multi-wire
branch circuit is being fed from the same leg of a home's
electrical service -- twice the rated current the neutral can
safely carry can be passing through it when both circuits
are being operated close to capacity...

This is why I suggested the OP make sure that *only* the
bathroom is being fed from the circuit demonstrating the
problems and that there is no connection to the neutral
wire of another circuit anywhere...

A loose connection is not always the answer, if that
were the case people wouldn't need to call out an
electrician every time they had an issue, they would
only need to check that all the connections were
properly tightened and that should solve the problem...

~~ Evan