I'm redoing some of the outlets in our house, as they are pretty loose. Some of these have been really easy, but I came across one today where there were 3 hots and 3 neutrals. All 3 were going into the quick-connects in a outlet which looks like this:
Don't mind the destruction on the quick-connect in the picture, as I broke that taking the wires off and am not re-using this outlet. My new outlets look like:
For my other installations I've been using the screws on the side rather than the quick-connects, but since I had 3 hots/3 neutrals I figured I'd try to put 4 on the screws and the other 2 in the little quick connect holes. However, this plan doesn't work because it seems that the wire is too large for the quick connect holes on my new outlets (maybe a 14 gauge vs 12 gauge difference? )
What do I do in this situation? Do I nut two of the hots and 2 of the neutrals together? If so, can I determine the exact type of nut I need with my wire stripper (AWG of the bare wire correspond to the gauge of the wire or do I need to include insulation?).
Edit: A picture of the sides of the outlet I'm replacing, in which it looks like the tabs are present:
Best Answer
Your two options here are to pigtail the hots and neutrals, or get a new "backwire" outlet. A backwire outlet has small wire clamps on the sides of the outlet so the wire can be inserted straight in rather than looping around the screw. This type of outlet might be sold as "heavy duty", but they are great for handling up to 4 conductors on each side. The ground will still need to be pigtailed, but that's usually not a big deal.
Example outlet
If you look closely at that picture, you can see 4 holes in the back on each side. Wire inserts straight into the holes and the screws on the side tighten the wire in clamps. They are very similar to your old push-connect outlet, but they clamp tight on the wire.
Backwire outlets are great for smaller boxes because you don't need to worry about a couple 4-wire bundles of 12GA wire getting pushed into the box along with the outlet.
A pigtail is used where there are too many converging wires to be accommodated by a fixture, such as you describe here. The converging wires, and another short length of similar wire (the pigtail), are twisted and secured by a wire nut. This leaves you with a single lead to attach to the fixture. (Added for completeness)