On 1/1/2012 11:56 AM, Art Todesco wrote:
On 12/31/2011 9:18 AM, Nate Nagel wrote:
On 12/29/2011 09:20 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.

Personally, I would do the following, assuming that your receps are all
in 3-1/2" deep boxes (should be, if it's new construction, due to
revisions in NEC regarding wire fill):

1) go to supply house and get a contractor pack or two of "spec grade"
receptacles in your chosen style and color (I think when I redid my old
house, they were a little over $1 apiece at the real supply house, about
what the builder grade ones go for at the big box. To my mind using the
best quality stuff when it's not that expensive is a good idea.)

2) pigtail and wire nut as you have described above

3) realize that what you just did is massive overkill, but you won't
worry about your receptacles again for another 20-30 years.

I like pigtailing better than relying on the recep for pass through, but
in older houses that used the standard single gang boxes for receps with
two cables in the box, it can get kinda tight, and busting all those
boxes out of the wall is kind of a PITA. So I have on some work not
pigtailed, but then again, I figure w/ spec grade devices and working
slow and paying attention to what I'm doing, I still have a way better
connection than you typically find with backstabs installed by an
electrician's helper.

To make the job go faster, some spec grade receps use clamps under the
screws like most GFCI receps do, if you use those then you don't need to
loop the wires for each pigtail connection. I don't have part numbers
off the top of my head though.

nate


Ya, I've sort of decided to do the pigtail thing. I'll probably use the
original outlets as they do have screws too and are not that bad
quality. However, I think the electrician and drywall guy kind of
screwed up in several areas. The plaster ears on the outlet in a few
places, don't grab the drywall, and thus, when you push a plug into the
socket, it moves inward a bid. With plastic plates, the plate will
sometimes crack next to the screw. Ok, on my soapbox; these newly
required outlets which close the holes are really a royal pain. I guess
I should bite the bullet and replace them with the non-blocking ones
while doing the rewire. But, I have changed a few where we are
constantly plugging and unplugging; the old styles are soooooo much
nicer. Now that I've hijacked my own thread, I'll proliferate another
sub-thread.

On ground up or ground down ... this house was totally ground down, i.e.
"the face". I have right angle plugs with both orientations! I even have
one right angle plug that where the cord comes off at a 45 degree angle!
So, I turned the one where I plug the Christmas tree. It's a heavy (14
gauge), flat air conditioner extension cord wired directly to an X10
outlet in an outlet box on the train board below the tree. Now this
thread has gone fully 360 as I have looped back to the original problem
which showed up due to the large number of C7 lamps on the Christmas tree.

I sympathize about the dead front receptacles. This is typical 1st
generation stuff. You can shim the receptacle screws to prevent the
plate breaking, or you can also buy white painted metal plates. They're
almost identical to the plastic ones, and they hold the outlet rigid