Minimum power to power a flourscent fixture

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.
 
So the polarity was actually reversed, as in the neutral was hot and the breaker was the neutral?

Or was just the color reversed?

Either way, the power would have still gotten to the light fixture, just a good chance the fixture chassis and anything else metal in the shop could have been hot to ground!

Also, being the wire changes size somewhere under ground, that means there is a splice. Any guess as to the quality of that?
 
(quoted from post at 21:09:30 08/28/18) So the polarity was actually reversed, as in the neutral was hot and the breaker was the neutral?

Or was just the color reversed?

Either way, the power would have still gotten to the light fixture, just a good chance the fixture chassis and anything else metal in the shop could have been hot to ground!

Also, being the wire changes size somewhere under ground, that means there is a splice. Any guess as to the quality of that?
here is no "polarity" with alternating current. Get right with terminology.
 
The color was reversed so the outlet was also reversed. The white wire was hot and the black wire was the neutral. The problem with the building is the guy that wired it wired the black wire to the black wire. The white wire which had the power nothing was wired to it at all. The building just had the black wire wired to the neutral and the neutral wire wired to the ground. This is what blows me away, he said the light fixture was working until recently.

I don't know if there is a splice under ground or whether it is wired to a second storage building. He doesn't remember and I didn't see the need to track it down. The wiring needed to be redone.
 
Stephen, I just bought a house and am in the process of figuring and tracing and labelling the wiring but so far I've only found one outlet with a missing equipment ground and NO reverse polarity yayyyyyyyyyyy. A few sub panel breakers weren't sized properly, although, the feeders TO the sub were still correctly protected. Just as an FYI regarding "terminology" in my career as a power distribution design engineer having attended several NEC Seminars all over the nation, in the trade in my day and in my location the Neutral was often called the "Grounded Conductor" and the Hot was called an "Ungrounded Conductor" which is true and obvious for any trained sparkies as I'm sure you understand. They (NEC Instructors as well as professional contractors and electricians) also used the term "reverse polarity" when the Hot and Neutral were reversed and spoke of "polarized" plugs and receptacles so Hot went first directly to the switch on a tool or appliance NOT the Neutral.

Best wishes

John T
 

In my day we had a ground and a neutral.
Today NEC calls them Grounding Conductor, and Grounded Conductor. I have a hard time remembering which is which.
What was wrong with the old way? Why change?

Dusty
 
Yo Dusty, I'm at the age where I earlier heard HOT and NEUTRAL, but in later years the NEC instructors started calling them Grounded Conductor (Neutral) and UnGrounded Conductor (Hot) lol... The way I remember them its the NEUTRAL, both in the HV Primary as well as the LV Secondary, that is grounded (at Transformer and Service Entrance) while the HOT isn't. From what I heard from electricians and NEC instructors I started referring to the third wire "Safety Equipment Grounding Conductor" as just that, what it is, instead of simply Ground which is a bit more ambiguous. Of course to many Billy Bobs and Bubbas out there Ground and Neutral are practically considered as being the same YEAH RIGHT !!!!!!!!!!!

Maybe see you in Florida again ??

John T
 
(quoted from post at 10:10:01 08/29/18) Yo Dusty, I'm at the age where I earlier heard HOT and NEUTRAL, but in later years the NEC instructors started calling them Grounded Conductor (Neutral) and UnGrounded Conductor (Hot) lol... The way I remember them its the NEUTRAL, both in the HV Primary as well as the LV Secondary, that is grounded (at Transformer and Service Entrance) while the HOT isn't. From what I heard from electricians and NEC instructors I started referring to the third wire "Safety Equipment Grounding Conductor" as just that, what it is, instead of simply Ground which is a bit more ambiguous. Of course to many Billy Bobs and Bubbas out there Ground and Neutral are practically considered as being the same YEAH RIGHT !!!!!!!!!!!

Maybe see you in Florida again ??


Maybe, we'll see how things go.

Dusty
John T
 

Both the neutral and load current carrying conductors . The neutral is held close to earth potential via a bond from the ground system.
 

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