| Fun with home improvement |
[Feb. 1st, 2009|03:26 pm] |
We had an electrical outlet here at the condo that had worn out. It was driving me nuts--the lower outlet wouldn't provide constant power, so anything plugged into it would flicker, and the top outlet wouldn't hold a plug. So I thought, "Okay, replace it." Easy, right? Just buy a new one and plug the wires into the new one, same as the old one. Right?
No.
I expected to see two black wires, two white wires and a ground wire. Instead, I found THREE black wires, THREE white wires and a ground wire. All of them were plugged into the back of the outlet.
It took a fair amount of web searching etc. to determine that the outlet was being used as a bridge. I'd never seen this done before. Two of the three black wires were providing power to the switch, and the third was continuing the circuit. To complicate matters further, you can't buy an outlet like our old one anymore.
So what to do with the one extra black and one extra white wire? I'm still not convinced that I did this correctly, but I ended up buying some wire ties and extra wire. I pigtailed and tied two of the three black wires together with a short length of the extra wire, and ran the extra wire to the outlet along with the third wire coming out of the box. I repeated with the white wires. And it seems to work.
This took me like three hours and two trips to the hardware store. At least I didn't electrocute myself across the room this time. |
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