Electrical – Electrician strangely cut and capped hot wire of receptacle

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Background: I recently moved into an apartment building in Canada (built in 1969). I don't know much about the electrical code, how grand-fathering works within it, etc., but I have an intermediate knowledge of household wiring.

Out of curiosity, I used a typical 3 light receptacle tester to double check the outlets. To my surprise, 7 of them had hot-neutral reversed. This didn't worry me much, because all of the devices I had plugged into them are small electronics with non-polarized 2 prong plugs (which trivially let you reverse hot and neutral). No big deal, I submitted a maintenance request, and had them fixed.

After the electrician came, 5 out of the 7 outlets were fixed, and two were completely non-functional (which were previously functioning but just reversed). I turned the power off and investigated for myself. I found the source of the issue: the hot wire for one of the outlets was cut and capped. The second non-functional outlet was downstream from this one, so that's why it wasn't working either.

Capped wire

Is that a dangling ground wire? Yep, sure is. But that's another question.

Shockingly (heh), the wall side of the wire is a short stub (which barely reached into the junction box) and isn't capped.

Stubby wire

My question: what's going on here? Why would anybody ever do this? Is this just some total shitshow, or is there some intention I don't know about?

Best Answer

A long shot, but maybe:

  • Hot wire broke
  • Instead of fixing it, someone swapped hot & neutral elsewhere and then for the neutral (not hot since they were swapped earlier in the chain) tied it to ground (which to a simple tester will look the same)
  • Latest electrician tried to fix the problem for you but due to the broken hot, couldn't easily fix it, and due to laziness and/or limited budget (i.e., he knows the landlord won't want to pay for many hours of extra work), he didn't fix it, just made it as safe as he could easily do.

The real fix depends on the type of wiring:

Cables

  • Remove the junction box and possibly cut holes in the wall for access
  • See if there is enough slack somewhere to use the existing wire and if that doesn't work...
  • Replace the entire section of cable (not fun), or
  • Use an approved in wall (i.e., hidden) splice to add an extension to replace the broken wire (not fun, but not as bad as running a new cable)

Conduit

  • Identify the other end of the broken wire and disconnect it
  • Pull out the broken wire
  • Put in a new wire

With conduit this should be easy. However there may be additional locations to be opened up along the path of the wire in order to get it all the way through. YMMV.

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