Red Deer Electrician | Wiring Gone Wrong: Real Wiring Mistakes that Should Never Happen
And we’re back with LumenTek Contracting, and I’m here with Ryan. He’s the owner-operator of LumenTek Contracting, and he’s got a story to tell you today, folks.
This one sounds super dangerous. I’ve only dealt with scenarios like this once before when I was an apprentice. Go ahead, man. Tell us the story. What the heck happened?
So, we got a call to a customer’s house. They wanted a bunch of work done. We kind of go through, take measurements, walk through some possible options and whatnot. Then we’re about to leave, and he goes, “Oh yeah, my counter plug doesn’t work. Can you take a look at that when you come back to do the work?”
No problem. I just kind of looked at it. I was like, “Okay, looks like a plug. It’s probably a bad GFI or something like that.”
So, we go home, do the quote, and we come back a week later to do the work.
Dangerous GFI Wiring Mistakes in Red Deer Homes
I pull the plug out, and there’s power there, but there’s no power to the plug. I kind of follow the wires back on the box. They switched the line and load for the neutral, and then they strip—
Okay, slow down. Slow down. Explain to the viewers what the heck that means. They switched the line and load. Maybe just walk through that a little bit.
Okay. So, when you run a kitchen circuit, you run from the panel to your first plug box, and then by code you can have one more plug box off that circuit.
So, what they did is they came off the panel. We call that the line. That’s the power coming in. Then on a GFI there’s line and load. So the line is from the panel, and then load—anything connected to that—is protected by the GFI. So that plug that’s fed off that doesn’t necessarily need the buttons on it. It’s still protected. So if there’s a ground fault from that plug, it’ll trip the GFI.
So if it’s wired wrong, you don’t get ground fault protection down the line.
So this house we went to, we pulled the plug out, and they had switched one of the wires from line to load and load to line. So they wired it backwards. That’s like a first-year mistake. You should never make that mistake.
And the weird thing is if you do that, the plug won’t even turn on. It won’t let you reset it if it’s wired wrong.
That’s kind of strange.
And the wires were stripped. Normally for a plug, you can strip 3/4 of an inch maximum. That’s all you need. They had almost 2 inches of wire stripped and wrapped around the screw with a big tail hanging out that touched the side of the box.
So there’s bare copper from the hot?
Yeah. All the wires. They’re touching the side of the box.
The ground from the panel that would ground the box somehow went straight to the plug, which is a bare wire. It went straight to the plug and didn’t touch any of the box itself. Sorry, it wasn’t connected to anything. It was just in the box loose, but not touching anything. It’s a metal box. It somehow managed to not touch any metal.
And the other wire going to the next plug was on the ground screw.
So what had happened is with the wire stripped way too long, when they put the plug in there, the power from the panel—the line, the hot wire—was touching the side of the box, making the box live. But because the ground wasn’t connected from the panel, it didn’t trip the breaker. It just made the next plug live.
So the whole box around the plug, the screws, everything was live.
They never tested the plug after, and it was so bad I thought there’s no way an electrician could have done this. It was definitely a homeowner watched a YouTube video—
But what did you find out?
No, he showed me the invoice from the previous owner. They had to fix the plug as a condition of the sale, and he showed me the invoice. I knew the company and everything. I couldn’t believe that a real company had done that.
I couldn’t believe a real company did that.
Well, folks, they charged double what we quoted to fix the plug.
Wow. They did what?
They charged double what we quoted for the plug.
Holy cow.
Yeah. It didn’t even work after. It wasn’t right. It wasn’t safe. It was the wrong size GFI plug. It was a 15 on a 20 amp circuit.
Why Improper Electrical Work Is So Dangerous
Wow. Okay. So tell us the potential danger of that scenario.
There’s lots. First of all, the plug fed off of it was live. Not live in the fact that it would work if you plugged something in. It was just that the box was live.
A lot of homeowners would assume that because it doesn’t work, there’s probably no power. Even electricians, you wouldn’t ever think to check the actual box to be live because that’s such a basic thing that should be impossible to mess up.
It was definitely the first time I saw it like that.
They managed to completely mess everything up.
The other thing too is you can hit the reset button. Usually it will turn red if it’s tripped, and there was no red light. There’s no green light. So a lot of people assume there’s no power.
So yeah, there’s lots of hazards there.
Yeah. And you mentioned to me before that it was at a dangerous height as well.
Yeah, it was at the end of an island. So it would have been right at head level for kids, and people lean against them all the time. That would wake you up.
So it could be a shocking experience if you touch that thing.
Just dangerous all the way around.
So that’s really unfortunate that a legit electrical company came out and did that type of work out there. But it lets you know, folks, that this stuff is dangerous, and you got to get people who have a good reputation and know what they’re doing.
I had a scenario similar to that. The side of the box, the hot wire, was touching the side of a box, and the grounds were all connected from one box to another, but the box was still alive.
Still alive.
So the side of the box was live. What we found out was the grounds weren’t going anywhere. The ground wasn’t connected. So the ground wire was hot, the box was hot, and it was all coming from the panel.
That happened when I was a first year working in a 100-year-old house. Knob and tube and all that fun stuff.
Electrical Hazards Homeowners Should Never Ignore
We had one like that where it was a trailer, and my friend’s a gas fitter. He called me and said, “Hey, I got shocked real bad changing out this hot water tank.”
I was like, “What did you do?”
And he’s like, “I was just stepping over the gas line. My leg touched it, and it shocked me.”
The gas line shocked you?
Yeah.
We went out there and took a look. I don’t know who did the work, but they should not be allowed to.
They had three panels. They had just run single conductor wire not in a cable from panel to panel.
I think what they did is from the first point of disconnect in the service, you’re supposed to bond neutral and ground. They didn’t have that. They had it in a sub panel instead, but they didn’t actually have a ground wire.
And when they ran their single conductors panel to panel, they switched neutral and hot.
Oh jeez.
So basically anything that was grounded was actually hot.
So from the plug that the gas fitter was using to plug in the boiler or the instant hot water, it was the opposite phase of the gas line. So between hot and hot and gas there was 240 volts.
Between the neutral on the plug that was fed from the panel that was wired better, that ground was 120 volts difference to the gas line ground.
Buddy could have died. He got shocked pretty good. He was unhappy about it.
Yeah, that would hurt.
Yeah, that’s not good.
There you go, folks. Electricity is dangerous stuff. Don’t do it yourself if you don’t know what you’re doing. Even sometimes when you get an electrician, they don’t know what they’re doing, surprisingly.
But I know that Ryan and his crew do really good work. He’s a master electrician. He knows his stuff.
If you guys are looking for some changes to do in your house or if you think that something’s wired a bit squirrely in your house, give them a call and he’ll be happy to come out there and check it out for you and get it corrected quickly.
Common Backstab Wiring Problems in Older Homes
Anything else before we go anywhere?
Counter plugs. Backstab. That’s another service call we got to do.
Okay. So tell people what backstab is.
So on the plugs, when you wire a receptacle, there’s your two screws. You have two hots, two neutrals on the regular 15 amp circuit.
What you’re supposed to do is strip the wire, bend it like a U-shape, like a cane, hook it on the wire, and then tighten the screw.
Then they came out with the quick connects, which is basically where you can stick the wire in there, and there’s a little tab that grabs the wire.
The problem with those is when you actually load up that circuit, it gets hot, and the connection doesn’t last.
So then you end up with a bunch of weird voltage issues, open neutrals, stuff like that.
Every time we see it, there’s always some kind of issue.
Even if they haven’t called us specifically for that reason, if you ask, “Do you notice that sometimes plugs don’t work or things break?” then they go, “Oh yeah, now that you mention it, our TV keeps dying. We have to keep replacing it.”
It’s like, “Oh yeah, you got 80 volts there. You should have 120.”
So it’s actually in the house we just bought, and my coffee maker died.
Oh no.
So I tested it, and it was like 100 volts. When you plug anything in, it went down to like 40.
So tonight I got to pull that apart and fix that connection.
That sucks.
Yeah. That’s not good.
So yeah, the quick connects in the back of receptacles are not really recommended to use because they heat up, cool down, heat up, cool down, and over time they just don’t have a nice firm connection to the wire, which causes those issues.
Anything else? Any other fun stuff?
No, otherwise it’s been pretty quiet.
Well, that’s good.
All right, thanks for joining us on this video. Hopefully you learned something today. And if you need an electrician, call Ryan at LumenTek Contracting. He’ll be happy to come out and check out your stuff and make sure that it’s working properly.
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