Josh wrote:
On Thu, 29 Dec 2011 09:20:59 -0500, Art
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.


I agree that backstabbed connections are not the best, however the one
electrical issue we had in our house (10yo; this occurred about 2
years in) was related to a wire nut connection.

My wife went to turn on the TV, and as it came on the lights went out
in the room; all of the outlets were dead. Checked the circuit
breaker, and it hadn't tripped (and flipping it off/on didn't help).
Then I realized that one outlet in the hall was supposedly on the same
circuit, and it was working. Weird. So I started pulling plates on
all the outlets on the circuit, and lo and behold, the one behind the
TV (which was second in the chain) had a blackened section of wire
insulation and wire nut. Apparently the wire wasn't fully inserted,
and must have been arcing for a while before the load caused it to
disconnect for good.

Very scary to think that could have started a fire, and presumably
some of what the new Arc Fault breakers are intended to detect.

I redid that whole box's connections with pigtails and side-screw
connections, even though it wasn't the backstab at issue here.

Josh
Hmm,
So which gets blame? poor workmanship or backstab connection?