In ,
John G typed:
Yesterday we had a burning plastic smell from an outlet. We shut off
power at the breaker and took off the outlet. It was black inside
the outlet. We cut off the "burnt" tips of the wires and stripped
them down. There were two wires coming in from right into the outlet
and one wire heading out the left from the outlet. How do we connect
the wires to bypass the outlet and restore power to the rest of the
circuit?

Splice the white wires together and add a pigtail. Splice the black
wires together and add a pigtail. If the ground wires are not
already spliced and pigtailed, do it. Put the pigtails on the
replacement outlet. By pigtailing, the outlet is no longer carrying
the full load of the circuit and the rest of the circuit will not
fail if the new outlet goes bad.

Were the original connections on the burnt outlet pushed into the
back of the outlet or were they on the side screws?

John Grabowski
http://www.MrElectrician.TV

The impression I got was that he just wanted to reconnect things for now
without replacing the outlet.

He wasn't very clear about exactly what is there now -- 3 wires, 2 on one
side, one on the other side.

I'm thinking maybe he could wire nut the 2 wires on one side together, wire
nut or cap the other wire, and not replace the outlet until later. But, I'm
not sure.