Stephen Newell
Well-known Member
I was tasked today to find out why the power on a customers storage building was off. Someone had run some romex wire from an outdoor outlet to the building and when I opened up the outdoor outlet I discovered someone had reversed the polarity. I thought OK I will go to the breaker box and make it right but at the breaker box it was correctly wired with 10ga solid copper wire to a 30a breaker. At the outdoor outlet I was working on it was 8ga wire and backwards. Don't know where it came from. It was in conduit coming out of the ground. What Goober No. 2 did was wire the black wire to the neutral and the neutral wire to the ground and just left the ground wire loose. I can't figure out how the guy was able to operate a 4' double tube light fixture off the neutral. Could there be that much backflow power there?
All I could do today was to recode the wires and correct the polarity problem. I let him know it needed to be redone with a sub-panel directly from the main. Right now he has 12ga wire in the building on a 30a breaker.
All I could do today was to recode the wires and correct the polarity problem. I let him know it needed to be redone with a sub-panel directly from the main. Right now he has 12ga wire in the building on a 30a breaker.