Residential Circuit breaker?

news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com:

short is a fault idiot meaning its either faulted or

with this word intermittent.

responded to the thread. You are the most dangerous of morons

I do believe that the warning, "It ain't so much what you don't know but what you think you know that just ain't so that kills you." applies here.

Good on you for shorting circuits that are being worked on.

My folks had an old mobile home that apparently had been made with aluminum wiring. She complained that half of one side of the house had no power, so I started testing. Came to one outlet that still had power, and went back one, and opened it up. It was black inside. It had come loose and burned, and no one had noticed! I replaced it with a new Al rated outlet, and started testing and replacing all the others...

Charlie

Been there, done that. The old house was built in 1969, right in the middle of the copper strike :-( ...Jim Thompson

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          Democrats are best served up prepared as a hash
           Otherwise the dogs will refuse to eat them :)

There were enough problems with aluminum wiring used for 15 & 20A branch circuits (used about 1965-1973) that UL pulled all the listings and issued new standards - that includes CO/ALR ratings for receptacles and switches.

The CPSC (U.S. consumer product safety commission) appeared to be headed for a recall of #12 & #10 aluminum wire, which would have been enormously expensive. In the inevitable court case, wire was deemed to not be a consumer product. A lot of testing of aluminum connections had been done for the CPSC by an independent lab. Recommendations, from an engineer involved in the testing, are at:

(The recommendations were around long before the manufacturer came out with a product.)

One major problem is that a thin insulating oxide layer forms very rapidly on an aluminum surface. Common to most of the recommended fixes is to put an antioxide paste (which just keeps oxygen away from the surface) on the wire and abrade it to remove the oxide. This is done, for instance, before installing a CO/ALR receptacle.

The author does not like the only wire nuts that are currently UL listed for aluminum. Recommended are:

which are also UL listed. They have a screw that digs into the wire through the oxide. I think it is the same style of splice they use in the UK.

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