On 12/29/2011 9:20 AM, Art Todesco wrote:
New 2 1/2 year old house. During construction I noticed the use of back
stabbed outlets. I complained to the electrician and he (no surprise to
me) said there is nothing wrong with using the back stabbed outlets and
that it wasn't anything different than he would do in his own house.
Well, last Christmas, I had an extension cord plugged into an outlet in
the living room with nothing connected to that extension cord. The
Christmas tree was on. We use the retro-look C7 lamps, some of the older
7 watt and some newer 4 watt. I disconnected the extension cord, which I
remind you had not current flowing through it and was connected to an
upstream outlet. The male plug on the extension cord was hot to the
touch. I measured the tree at about 10.5 amps. This year I did a little
checking on how the circuit was fed and found out there were only 2
outlets before the one where the Christmas tree was plugged into. So, I
opened them up and pigtailed the looped through Daisy chain using a wire
nut and stub wire to the outlets on those 2 outlets and the one where
the Christmas tree was actually connected. But before I measured
voltages. After, I had about 4 volts higher at the tree outlet and, of
course, no heating of the 2 outlets before the tree. Thinking about it,
there were a total, including neutrals, 10 back stabs in line with the
Christmas tree, so that's .4 volt drop on each.

Anyway, I want to "fix" this throughout the house. My question is, which
is better, using a wire nut and stub to the outlet or using all 4 screws
on the outlet to preform the loop through? I noticed that the jumper
piece on the outlets is pretty small .... I would guess that it is less
bulk than a 14 gauge wire .... but it is in open air. My vote would be
for the wire nut, but I'd like to hear from the experts.

BTW, I notice on another outlet that he actually used the back stabs to
do the loop-through and tapped off one of the screws with another wire
to Tee off to someplace else. Electrically this works, but is it to code?

And, I will be looking at LED C7s for the future, but they really are
not quite up in brightness yet. I put some LED C9s outside and they were
considerably dimmer than their room-heater equivalents and they do
blink. But as I have done on other LED Christmas lights, I use a full
wave rectifier in line. I know this doubles up on the wattage of the LED
and probably shortens its life, but they do look a whole lot better.
Thanks for all the good discussion. I was primarily curious what
everyone thought and I now have a good idea. I will probably use the
pigtail/wire nut method as much as possible, when I make the changes.
But, I probably won't go and do it wholesale, all at one time.
Actually, the other day I had to open 3 outlets for another reason. I
did use the screws to daisy chain in 2 of 3 outlets. The 3rd, as I had
mentioned used the back stabs plus one pair of screws. On this one,
the 3 wires were connected together with a wire nut and a 4th wire stub
to the outlet screw. Yes, I guess I should have demanded that the
electrician do it "my way", however, the guy was kind of a jerk and I
didn't want to push the issue.