On 12/29/2011 05:38 PM, HeyBub wrote:
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.

You may not need a pigtail. Try giving the wire a tug or two. A competent
electrician will leave 6-8" of slack in a new installation for just such a
contingency.


The point of the pigtail is not wire length, it's to avoid passing a
potential 12+ amps of current through the little side tabs on a typical
duplex receptacle.

nate


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