My house was built in 1955. Original cloth braided wiring. However, the words are visible on some of the wires in the attic and they do say that they have a ground wire. My ground outlet tester confirms that the outlets are grounded.
Today, I was looking at this outlet and it was wired differently than I have seen before (power was off at the breaker and I was positive it was off). I was given advice to not touch anything and have an electrician come out because I don't know what I'm doing. Which is fair, I don't know too much about this. But I'd like to learn for my own knowledge.
The wiring to the receptacle has two hot wires screwed in and one neutral wire screwed in. The other other neutral is put in the back "stab in." The ground screw at the bottom left of the receptacle does not have a ground wire around it. However, my ground tester said it was grounded correctly. If I look in the back of the box, I can see what appears to be a ground wire twisted together. However, I don't fully understand how it's grounded back there.
Here are a couple of pictures:
The hot wires
The one neutral wire
The stab in neutral in the back
What I think is the ground wire in the back
A few questions:
- What have one neutral wire stab in? Why not just use the open screw that is there? As you can see it came loose in the picture. So the outlet isn't working.
- Why isn't the ground wire around the ground screw? The way it looks currently is that the two ground wires are twisted together. Neither is connected to the ground screw terminal. My understanding is that they should be connected, preferably with a wire nut instead of just twisted together, and then one of the ground wires should go to the ground screw terminal. From what I can tell, that isn't being done and they are just twisted together in the back. How come I'm getting a reading that it is correctly grounded? Is it because the yoke is metal and both the yoke and copper are touching the metal box?
Any help would be greatly appreciated!
Best Answer
I was having a hard time making out where the neutral with the bad insulation came from. it did not look wrapped on the other screw or no wire left there I can see. That bothers me unless there was a back stab on the receptacle then the long strip would make sense it pulled out.
One common place for solid wire to break is at the strip point if the wire is nicked or not (the reason most electricians won’t use solid wire in industrial locations or where there is high vibration).
The grounding conductors in the box should be connected to the box and the box can be the ground to the receptacle.
To me it looks like the hot jumper between top and bottom receptacles is intact so there is probably another receptacle that was not working since this one was dead. But if the hot tab is broken one of the receptacles is probably switched.
Last the wrap on the neutral is the wrong direction, the hot conductors are correct.
Code specified wrap is 66-75% the code book shows this as aluminum wire but inspectors use that as a guide for copper also.