Doofus Tradesmen Worse Than Typhoid
June 9th, 2010Another Brush With Death
A while back, I wrote about a Bosch charger that blew up on me. I was cleaning up my workbench, and I had a Bosch charger and a Panasonic charger next to each other, and when I moved the Bosch, it touched the Panasonic. There was a noise and a flash, and the Bosch quit working. I opened it up and replaced the fuse, but the whole unit was garbage.
A reader suggested the outlet was bad, so I checked it, and the test doodad said I had an “open hot.” I checked to find out what that meant; tradesman jargon is generally meaningless at face value, and this was no exception. Far as I could determine, it just meant the wire that carried the power was not connected. Which was wrong, since the outlet had been working.
The circuit in question was installed by some lowballing chusma a long time ago. He used the cheesiest Chinese sockets imaginable, and I suspect that his son ran off with one of my fishing rods. I think he made the sockets in his garage in Hialeah, out of papier-mache. I bought a box of outlets a year or two ago and replaced the Chinese junk, but the “open hot” outlet was the lone holdout. I ran out of new outlets, so this one didn’t get changed.
Today I started working on it again. It turned out I had bought a replacement outlet, so I didn’t need parts. I shut down the power (I thought), and I started checking the wiring. When I took the front plate off the square box, half of the Chinese receptacle came with it. Very nice.
I poked around on some adjoining outlets, and suddenly, I felt a tingle. I got shocked. I could not believe it. Somehow, juice was getting through. I disconnected everything that was hooked up to the circuit, and I flipped the adjoining breakers. Still, the juice flowed. I found this out by causing a short that scarred my screwdriver.
Here’s what I eventually found. There were four wires, not three, going to this circuit. The genius who installed it ran a red hot wire to one breaker and a black hot wire to another breaker. Don’t ask me why. I cannot fathom this type of brilliance.
I went back to the breaker board and capped off the red hot. I rewired the circuit so everything ran off the same breaker. I tried the circuit tester. All was well.
Someone explain why an electrician would put two hot wires in one 120 circuit. No, I don’t want to know. I’m just glad all I lost was a battery charger.
June 9th, 2010 at 3:27 PM
That was a close one, Steve. I understand why YM flew one of our installers down from Canada to install the storage shelving for the Urban Planet store in Ft Lauderdale.
June 9th, 2010 at 4:46 PM
Who says stupidity is a barrier to advancement?
June 9th, 2010 at 8:47 PM
“Someone explain why an electrician would put two hot wires in one 120 circuit”
.
I might, if I’d pulled four-conductor wire. Well, okay, I probably wouldn’t, but there’s no reason not to, so long as you connect both wires to the same thing at both ends. Running them to separate breakers is the kind of inspired, creative thinking that’s the next best thing to arson.
.
Glad there were no serious consequences.
June 9th, 2010 at 8:49 PM
All existing home wiring (all wiring for that matter) is suspect until you personally check the circuit(s) and verify that juice is not flowing.
I have a couple of cheap circuit testers made by Greenlee and they keep me out of trouble without getting “bitten” with hot circuits which I think are disconnected.
It’s common practice to (and legal per code) run a four wire (two hot leads and one neutral and one ground ) off a 220 V two pole/phase circuit and split the phases out to save a few cents in copper and service panel space.
I suspect based on your experience that the installing contractor cheated and used two single pole breakers instead of a single two pole breaker to serve the recepticles in the area you’re working on …thus your tingling elbows.
Lesson learned…turn off the breaker, then use a volt/ohm meter or other trusted electrical device to verify the the lack of voltage and more importantly…current.
I always lick my fingers and then brush the wires I’m working on as a last quality control verification because I hate getting shocked also and one day it could be the last day it happens.
June 10th, 2010 at 12:34 AM
Occasionally you will run a red and black wire to the same duplex plug if you know that the user will be pulling a lot of juice from in one location. (say a shop vac and a large saw) This is a dicey thing to do because the installer must do two things correct. One, the tab between the two hot terminals must be snapped off. Two, the red and black wires must be out of phase with tech other. (neutral is the same for both plugs) Failure to do number one will give instant sparks. Failure to do number two leads to a condition called “neutral loading” and can burn your house down.
It works like this: Say you have two appliances each pulling 17 amps on the same duplex plug. (Assuming 12ga wire and the red and black each on a 20 amp breaker) The circuit won’t blow because you are within the load capacity of the breaker even though you are pulling 34 amps.
If the circuit is wired correctly the neutral (white) will be carrying zero amps (or the difference in amps between the two plugs) because each of the hots (black and red) cancel each other out. If the hots are on same phase then the neutral is carrying 34 amps (or the addition of the two plugs).
June 10th, 2010 at 8:34 AM
I’ve done something vaguely similar. It’s the worst sort of redneck jack*ery, but if you break the tab between the hot-side screws and connect the two hots to opposite legs (a 220 breaker, in other words) you get a 220V outlet by using two 110V cords. If you’re miles from the nearest electrical supply place on a Saturday night, and need a 220V outlet immediately, it might be considered defensible. Of course it violates every electric code on this planet or any other in the Universe.
Connecting to different breakers? Does not compute in any way.
June 10th, 2010 at 9:21 AM
So you had 220V at the outlet? Unreal. Sounds like the putz had some 4 wire lying around he had to use.
June 10th, 2010 at 8:05 PM
Virgil hit the nail on the head. I spent a year after purchasing my house correcting the wiring and running ground wires to all the 2 prong sockets in order to upgrade them to grounded condition.
My other thought is that the circuit was once a 220V feed using two different phase feeds at the breaker box and some moron re-did the outlets (was each outlet independently powered and the bridge bus cut out?
June 11th, 2010 at 6:34 AM
I never bought one of those tester plugs. Two many bad stories. Voltmeter tells you all.