Not grounded and some of it is probably 70 year old rubber insulation. Besides that, this house gets cold because most has little wall insulation. That would be a good time to do all of it.
Installing a surface electrical box over an existing wall box?
- Thread starter y_p_w
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Not grounded and some of it is probably 70 year old rubber insulation. Besides that, this house gets cold because most has little wall insulation. That would be a good time to do all of it.
Turns out the solder was only two wires and no actual pigtail. I guess this must have been a different era where someone trimmed out or slid the insulator on one wire, wrapped the other wire around that straight bare segment, then soldered it together and covered it with maybe electrical tape or self-bonding rubber tape. I covered the ends with lever connectors so I didn't have to worry about it shorting.
There were more of these in the house and I slowly started to cut them off and replaced them with wire nuts and pigtails. These things just take up so much space in the box. Not that bad when it was a compact receptacle, but a huge pain when trying to install a GFCI outlet.. Except one that's such a mess that I'm not sure I'd be able to replace it and would need an electrician to install armored wire. It was armored wire going through a crawl space, so it might not be as bad and the box was coming up as grounded.
Not sure who did them or when, but some had just electrical tape while others seemed to have self-bonding rubber tape and then friction tape or electrical tape to protect the rubber tape. The rubber tape residue was ridiculously hard to get off my fingers.
I also noticed that the soldered connections weren't particularly strong, which I suppose is why it was at least an inch. But they broke off fairly easily unless the solder was absolutely gooped on.
I did have one heckuva time trying to get three wires lined up for a wire nut inside a box or maybe just extending less than an inch outside the box. It's a lot easier to line up 3-4 wires if it's a good 3 inches outside of the box. I would have considered a 3-port push-in or lever connector. I opted for wire nuts because I didn't want to trim more wire that I couldn't really get it straight (which is recommended for push-in or lever connectors). I was even thinking of using wire nuts to connect two wires at a time (to extend them) which seems a lot easier. Then wire nut the two extended wires to a pigtail further out where it's easier to line up a connection.
I bought a set of winged wire nuts from Wally World. For a given color they seem to be slightly bigger than the same color that I got from Harbor Freight (which are made by Heavy Power). The tan ones I got today seem to be about same coil size as the red ones from HF. This definitely does add to the frustration factor. However, this did come with 15 tan wire nuts, and those seem to be about the same size as the previous reds I got.
https://www.homedepot.ca/product/ideal-can-twist-wire-connector-300-pack-/1000665625
These are popular in Canada. Covers almost every combination in residential
These are popular in Canada. Covers almost every combination in residential
This is the standard here - the tan Twister.
https://www.homedepot.com/p/IDEAL-Twister-Wire-Connectors-341-Tan-100-Per-Package-30-341P/202894284
I got this one from Harbor Freight - kind of a discount hardware store. I really don't have much use for the really small ones, but it comes with 10 of the largest reds and 18 of yellow, which are good sizes for 2-3 wires. I did find myself using a lot of the orange ones (50) to extend 14 AWG wires. I don't know why the label says they're made in China, as the wire nuts themselves were from Heavy Power (which sells to Home Depot) which manufactures in Taiwan. I saw an identical assortment under a different brand name at a hardware store for double the price.
https://www.harborfreight.com/158-piece-wire-connector-assortment-67520.html
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