THIS IS WHY ELECTRICIANS DON'T HIDE J-BOXES IN WALLS - Finding Hackwork!!

[Music] [Music] all right so today's service call i get to chase a ghost so i got a call from a customer they're like i've had five electricians or whatever however many electricians out there's some plug that's doing this weird thing there's got it's like got some weird voltage or something i don't know can you come out and look at it all right hold up the first thing i do when i get a call from somebody like this is i try to get as much answered as possible i'm gathering i have a lot of unknowns that i'm trying to like whittle those down to a list of knowns and you'll find here in a minute when i'm actually at the job that that's the same methodology that i keep i always try to get as many knowns gather as much even if it's too much extra information doesn't matter the more data the better because you're going to eventually get it down to the parts you don't know and you can't find and you have to make an informed educated guess sometimes so i just started asking questions i was like all right so when you say weird voltage does that mean like like 40 volt like what does weird voltage mean to you and they're like i don't know like usually it's supposed to say 120 and it doesn't say 120 and i'm like well is it 120 between hot neutral or like what are you testing and they're like well i didn't actually test anything it was like a helper of the like carpentry guy i'm like okay well i'm not gonna rely on anything you're telling me like this is something i'm actually gonna have to verify when i get out there so i was like is there any other places in the house you know i started to just try to like build a picture of what was happening they're like yeah there's some lights that are flickering all of a sudden in the last like day or two they weren't doing that before there's some light switches that just stopped working and uh i was like okay well is there construction that's happening are these guys doing anything in that area and they're like yeah you know they're working right above it there's a bathroom floor that way they just like remodeled the whole bathroom and i'm like alright well they probably something up you know like honestly that's the most likely thing um so anyways i got all of that information together and i set up a time to go out there and meet them so when i got on site the first thing that i did is i needed to map out the affected area so really uh i needed to start to kind of like build a picture in my mind of what i think is going on and to do that i need to start asking a lot of questions and trying to figure out so i asked the homeowner what's going on like what's the what's the biggest thing that you noticed um and the first thing they talked about was this plug with the weird voltage so it's like all right let's start there um it was in kind of a central location in the house but it was you know in the kitchen and so i went over to it stuck my plug tester in it and it said hot and ground reverse and i was like okay well i mean that might be like a simple problem and i stuck my multimeter in but i started to get weird voltages so this was the crazy thing i was getting like 10 volts hot to ground i was getting nothing between hot and neutral and between neutral and ground i was getting 120 volts so i was like that's extra weird so like somebody maybe somebody was in here and they took some things apart and put some like a switch back in and messed up the wiring that happens all the time especially with helpers of carpenters that shouldn't be doing electrical work but that are because they're just trying to cover something they took you know like that happens all the time so anyways i started building this affected area and if you can imagine this house when you walk in the front door immediately to the left there is a kitchen there's a few countertop receptacles in the kitchen for you know the like um the toaster and the the coffee maker then there's a refrigerator and there's this one plug that's down at like knee height everything else is countertop receptacles in the kitchen but there's just one random plug down here and then he said well there's the other problems that we're having are kind of across into the dining room across the house by the patio there's a back patio door there's a switch next to that door and then near that there's also a bathroom and this bathroom and the patio door evidently he were where he was saying the lights actually worked before and now they just don't work and some of them were flickering sometimes and he said the last thing that i noticed is that our garage lights don't work and it was the same thing with these led strips that are just kind of like tacked up on the ceiling and there's a receptacle in the ceiling that we plug into and they used to work just fine like last couple weeks and and like now they they flickered a bunch one day and now they just don't work at all so it's like all right something has changed in this circuit from the last couple weeks that's helpful information no i always ask people how long has it been like this is this something like that's for like the last three years or you guys just have never seen it work or is this something in the last three days because that gives you a lot of information you know these guys were up there in the last three days three years ago these guys weren't up there you know so like it's just honing in you're just gathering data the more questions you can ask when you're trying to troubleshoot something the better so again i'm just right now all i'm doing trying to do is map the entire area so i know like well over by this patio it makes sense the light doesn't work but it also right next to it the bathroom lights don't work and right next to that the garage lights don't work so i'm like this is all probably one thing and i'm like this over here the plug in the kitchen that might that might be a different thing it very well could could be the way it was being explained and the time frame and everything it seemed like that was probably a separate problem so once i got all of that mapped out i started to try to figure out where the electrical panels were because i just wanted to know kind of the possibility of what direction some of these wires might be coming to and going from since everything's above sheetrock or in walls and i can't see any of it [Music] now one thing to think about is working safely while you're troubleshooting so troubleshooting this is a time where you're coming into an already energized environment and you're going to be using test equipment on live circuits working with live circuits so this is an environment where i think it's a good idea just to talk about working live and whether or not we should or shouldn't do it so you have to understand that when you're going in to diagnose a problem you need the circuit to be energized so you need to be able to test things and open things up to be able to put your your multimeter on things to test to see if things are energized or not and to be able to get readings but there's a point where you're troubleshooting and you found all of your values and now it's time to start opening things up and and like disassembling conductors before you do that that is the time to go shut the circuit off a lot of people would just keep it live the whole time and just keep blowing through but that's where you run into problems you'll forget that it was live you'll think that you tripped a gfi but it actually isn't tripped or the homeowner heard it trip and they didn't realize what you're doing and they just went over and reset it like it's not worth the risk of you getting electrocuted because like i know people are like well it's 120 volts doesn't really matter no dude 120 volts can kill your ass 120 volts can kill your ass 120 [Music] like for real less voltage than that can kill you so it just depends on how much resistance you offer to a circuit how much current's going through you where it's going through if it's going through your heart there's a whole bunch of things but just minimizing the amount of risk it's stupid to work on stuff live if you don't have to if you have to that's different wear good ppe all that jazz you guys hear me talk about this all the time all i'm trying to get at is that when you're troubleshooting things know that you're going to have to work on stuff that's live for a certain point to get your values but then as soon as you don't have to have the power on anymore kill the power then start working on all your stuff and don't turn the power back on until you're done until everything's safe again and then you're verifying again on a live circuit when everything's finished conveniently the subpanel was located right on the other side of the countertop gfci so i knew where the home run was in the kitchen area and since this one receptacle was in the kitchen area i was really hoping that this was on the gfci circuit so i hit that little test button on my gfci tester and it tripped the countertop receptacles and i thought i was like well there's a there's a possibility if this is wired in a haggard weird way and there's some kind of wires mixed up that that's not even the same circuit it could be a different circuit and it's just it's tripping because this thing is sending a signal to that gfci through the ground or something you know some kind of weird thing so it wasn't 100 solid that it was on that circuit and the reason is because this whole weird voltage problem on this one receptacle was not the same on all the countertops all the countertop receptacles when i put my uh multimeter in they read just how they were supposed to 120 hot to neutral 120 hot to ground and nothing neutral to ground beautiful all of these receptacles were like this they were all fine but this thing kept tripping those gfis so it's like all right there's a there's a good likelihood this is the same circuit and it's a kitchen circuit gfi protection you know like it makes sense so the next thing that i thought to do was to get my circuit tracer out so i've got a low voltage network toner that when you hook it up it emits a tone in the wand when the wand is near the conductor so you hook this toner up to conductors somewhere and then you can drag this wand along the wall along the ceiling and it'll actually squeal when you're next to the wire that it is hooked up to so i love this tool this is a good pro tip [Music] so for a pro tip one thing to understand about these toners is they can be somewhat unreliable from time to time and it takes a little bit of practice to get used to how to use them properly you'll find that older houses like you know 60s 70s even 80s houses a lot of them are wired very differently than the way that we have started wiring things in the 90s 2000s and today so the codes and standards for those eras were different so you'll notice that going into a 1970s home there's neutrals tied together everywhere through the entire house every switch is tied to every light there's junction boxes it's like all one massive neutral through the whole house now each conductor each actual hot might be you know in a home run that goes in and like that's kept isolated but the neutrals were just all connected a lot of the grounds and stuff were too so when you hook up a toner to a black and a white conductor you'll notice sometimes that you'll get a signal but it's really faint and it's weird it seems like it goes to like six different places and that's because it is so you have this nine volt battery that's sending a signal this nine volts through the conductors that your wand is picking up on so if it's sending say it's sending like uh this signal going out on the black conductor well the signal coming back on the neutral is not coming straight back like it's going straight out it's coming into wherever these neutrals split out and it's going to all of these locations so that signal fades there's a voltage drop that's happening in this tester so you're going to get like weird readings you're going to be like why is this black wire over here like toning like crazy but the white that's coming out of the same sheathing is not making any noise or it's like really really quiet or why is every one of these things toning out like it should just go from here to a place but you'll just notice that using these things especially in older era homes they're really unreliable so you have to kind of go over to continuity testing just to verify your results now this home that i'm working on was built in the 90s so it's really not that off everything in the 90s and on is pretty much wired the same from one electrician to another within reason we kind of run a home run to a plug or to a switch and then we go out from the next thing to the next thing to the next thing it's all pretty much the same so what i did is i took my toner out and i went to that first receptacle and since i couldn't really figure out where it was going any logical way i had to tone out the path so i followed it up a wall i was getting a pretty good tone and then i got to the spot in the ceiling where it just disappeared so i was like why is that disappearing right there am i just like is it going up a wall upstairs maybe and it just keeps going up and uh i asked the homeowner they're like no there's no wall anywhere around there so like all right well that's kind of weird so opened up the receptacle and i took the device off and i put the white and the black conductor together under a wire nut that basically makes the black and white that from one location back to that same location it makes a loop by connecting those two so when i go to this side and i test on the black and the white for a loop i can send a signal down the black since it's wire knitted to the white it comes back on the white so i should be able to get a reading so i i did i put a continuity tester on the other end when i opened that last plug up that was on that gfci countertop series of plugs i found the other end of it so i was like oh okay so even though i can't like with my wand find this conductor over here i know with my multimeter through using continuity that this plug and this plug are touching this is one continuous piece of wire now it may go up and do some other crazy somewhere else who knows i can't see that but i do know that that goes from here to here at least so that was a good starting point so now that i figured that out i was like all right well let me take my toner over here i'll take the continuity off i'll take all my joints apart and let me hook the toner up on this side and see if i can get uh you know from here over to that other plug and there was just something weird in the middle so i did i took my wand i hooked everything up i got a good solid tone all the way over to the same exact spot and it just disappeared again i was like okay what's going on in this area what is here that's making me lose all this and i'm like doing big sweeps all the way around the area not catching it anywhere else so i was like all right it's time to move on so now i know that the first half of this circuit is not reading the same voltage but it is still tied to the problem so from there we jump in this direction towards all of these problems we're having and all of a sudden there's problems so there's something in the middle there's all the good clean stuff there's all the crap and there's this spot in the middle that i'm losing my my signal so now i start moving further and i take that wand and i just go okay i know there's an issue there and i'm not finding it let's see where else i do find it so now i just started to move towards the other problems that the homeowner was telling me were there and sure as i started getting closer and all of a sudden bbbbb i start hearing that tone and i'm like you gotta be me so this one wire tones out over here over here and it's toning out over here and i go over to the bathroom it's toning out there and i go into the garage and it's toning out there so i was like i bet there's a junction box in that ceiling somewhere or they made a joint in one of the recessed cans but i was i was losing the signal by the can it was a few feet away from that where i was losing the signal but i was like i bet there's a junction box i would still imagine i would get a tone coming to that junction box but i don't know sometimes there's weird materials and things get in the way so i just took a guess at this point i was like i get verified there's a whole bunch of on this half of the circuit and i've verified everything over here is clean and cool and i got a problem spot in the middle so i noticed there was a recessed can that was a six inch can big enough for me to fit my head inside of and actually look so i was like it i'm just gonna take that recess can trim out i'm gonna take the actual can housing itself there's three little screws in almost every single one of these cans if it's a new construction like a nail on kind of can you can actually take the tube completely out and that lets you get to the junction box to work on wires if you ever have to in the future so i put my head up in there and i saw this huge coil just ball of wire up there just romex just a big old knot of it and i'm like okay so something's here so i start pulling all of the slack down and i hear this clunk clunk clunk and i'm like yeah there's a j box up there and a metal one i know that for sure like i know that clunk and so i stick my phone up in the hole and took some pictures and sure there was a four inch octagon box um just sitting up there made and with joints made in it and so i started to try to pull to get the box over into the hole that i was in to work on it but i didn't have any slack to pull my direction i had tons of slack to pull the other way i just didn't have any slack so i was like like i have to cut this ceiling there's nothing i can do there was a vent nearby and i thought like maybe if it was like a soft vent or something i might be able to like get it loose and pop it up and do everything right there because that was right next to where the joint was but it wasn't it was a hard duct and the way that those things are mounted there's these little uh straps that are pinched in from the sheetrock to the studs to the floor trusses so there's no way i was gonna get this thing off even if i tried to cut you know like two sides i couldn't get around to the other side to cut the other strap so this is i was screwed so i told the homeowner i was like all right so this is what i found i think i've found everything and i think i have a pretty positive diagnosis for you i am like 90 positive that this junction box is our problem probably 98 percent positive uh with a two percent chance that they're like this still may not fix the problem so i was like i gotta cut a hole in here to get to these wires but you need to know if i cut a hole here it may not fix the problem because i can't see anything i can't open the junction box to see what the problem is so it may not be there maybe like maybe there's another junction box somewhere that i'm not seeing and it jumps out you know like who knows um so but i did the due diligence i went to every location i yanked on these wires and i could see them going in all of the directions that they should one of the wires went down to this crazy plug and i yanked on it and i saw the wire actually move and the plug moved so i was like alright well i know that's that wire and then the other one disappeared in the same direction going over to that switch and i couldn't see it move or anything but i was like for a fair guess i'm pretty sure that's where it goes but again this this box was hooked up and it was so far over that i couldn't reach it i couldn't open it i couldn't work on it i had to cut the hole just to get access to this box just to work on the thing now the other thing to note is since i didn't have access to this jbox i couldn't take readings from any of these other conductors i knew that when i turned the circuit on all of them got hot and they showed weird voltages and i knew when i shut it off they all shut off together but without getting into this junction box i really couldn't do any other kind of diagnostics to it so the solution that i came up to i thought was kind of creative i looked in the kitchen and i'm like bro your recessed cans are really not spaced out in any sort of awesome way it's kind of like they're just kind of placed randomly so like what if we just add another recess can right there where that damn junction box is i could cut a new six inch hole get a recess or you know remodel can put a remodel can up there that would allow me to use the junction box for making joints in that would give people access and it would make the you know everybody the code gurus happy because now it's an accessible joint [Music] so on that note let's look and see what it says in the national electric code for splices in junction boxes and stuff like that 314.29 boxes conduit bodies and handhold enclosures shall be installed so that wiring contained in them can be rendered accessible in accordance with 314.29 a and b now under a it says in buildings and other structures that's us we're in a structure and a building says boxes and conduit bodies shall be installed so the contained wiring can be accessed without removing any part of the building or structure without having to cut a hole in the ceiling so the last electrician did not do it to code they didn't make all of this stuff accessible and it needs to be accessible every recessed can has a box mounted to it so if the wires going into that box are okay for us to make joints in and they're considering the removal of that can to access this junction box as accessible then any other conductors that we want to put in this box are also accessible if we use that box [Music] fun fact did you know that you no longer have to put recessed cans in anymore so in my house and generally when i'm doing a remodel i'll put stuff like this in if you see from the picture it's essentially a can trim that has a housing on it so my public 30 needs to put in my house but the only thing that you need there's the enclosure right here this is where your wires go you can still select you know a bunch of different colors again like these are everybody's making color changing or color selecting uh recess cans now but what's really cool is when you're in remodel environments like i'm in right now i could have just taken one of these and stuck it up there or found one that's like a six inch version and all you have to do is just hook right up to the junction box you just stick it up in the hole like this and these fingers snap down and pinch it on the sheetrock and keep it in place this is wicked like i really don't use recessed cans anymore or any like remodel uh style cans anymore i just use this kind of stuff but in this situation he already had six inch existing cans and canned trims that he had already bought so i had to do something that would match it and the only way to match it was to get a remodel can but i recommend everybody stops putting three model cans in they just suck you don't have to this is super profile like low profile there's even like slimmer versions where the where this junction box is not mounted to the can it's like remote so you can even get more slimline stuff that will fit like right underneath a stud so you can literally put them everywhere now there doesn't matter if you cut a hole and it's like oh damn it there's a piece of wood doesn't matter these things are so low profile but anyways i figured i would share that with you because i hate remodel cans and i think a lot of other people do too so what i did is once i cut the hole in the ceiling i saw the junction box right there exactly where i cut this hole out and i opened it up the wire nut for the neutral was melted um you actually see the metal exposed for the spring inside the wire nut and then the neutral conductors themselves the insulation had melted together on all of the conductors now i didn't actually see any place where there was a hot conductor touching a neutral or a ground touching a hot or anything to give us that weird potential that we were getting between neutral and ground and for there to not be any potential between hot and neutral i just didn't see anything once i started to move the joints around you know i may have actually changed the situation which that's always that's always a a concern right a lot of inexperienced people will just start going and breaking things open and taking plugs apart taking switches apart and a lot of times that ends up like screwing everything up and it moves the problem somewhere else but i knew that this was my problem right away i just saw the melted wires as it was so when i started moving all of that stuff i just stuck my plug tester in down below just because i was curious and i started wiggling everything around and i started seeing my plug tester the lights just started going crazy on it and i was like okay it's just a loose joint so i'm getting some weird voltage readings because there's a loose joint and it's traveling and probably going in a different direction so i don't know that the actual voltage readings that i was getting were true voltage readings it may have been kind of a ghost voltage situation um based off of the the overall resistance of the the length of these conductors and where they run who knows i don't i didn't care about that i verified that wiggling this stuff around i found the loose joints i found the melted wire nuts and i saw that it messed with the actual circuitry when i wiggled it so then once i got all the lights like on like they should be where it didn't show there was any reversals or anything it just showed my hot neutral and ground were all wired correctly i went down there with my multimeter and the voltage was just fine it corrected itself just by me jiggling everything so i was like all right well here we go so i took everything apart stuck all the new conductors and the existing conductors into that junction box made up all the joints and then i left it hang there for a minute i didn't want to put this thing back up in the hole until i went down and verified that it fixed everything so i went down checked the plug again we had good voltage solved the problem everything was good to go went over the patio switch flipped it on light turned on beautifully went into the bathroom flipped it on light turned on went into the garage flipped it lights came on i was like golden solved the problem um so most of the problem was just trying to find this weird problem that existed but the actual fix itself was was pretty easy to do one thing i did do is because i had a receptacle in the ceiling of the garage and there were led lights hooked up to it i didn't want to just assume that i had fixed the problem everywhere else i really only took the voltage reading at this first plug so what i did is i went to every one of the devices that was affected and i checked the voltage there too even though i knew it was all working it was probably fine just check like you're already there um it's worthwhile to check got clean 120 between hot and ground hot neutral got nothing between ground and neutral so everything was good to go i put everything back together and then i put this can back up in the hole the homeowner actually got brand new recessed canned trims and they had like adjustable colors on them so there was different kelvin ranges which i love like all recessed cans now should have that and they're starting to make more and more of them with them that way but that way you can control the color spectrum if you want more cool light if you want more warm light or whatever if you like that like sterile hospital bluish white you could have it so we just put all new recessed canned trims in got everything back together and cleaned up now you'll notice as i am cleaning up that i put down a moving blanket or like a drop cloth i always keep a drop cloth with me in my truck in my van um and it's something that i keep under me when i'm working especially when i'm working overhead doing dirty stuff i'm in somebody's kitchen you know like you know the last thing you want to do is be so inconsiderate that you just start cutting and there's sheetrock all over and they eat off these tables and they're prepping food it's like it's such a like irritating thing to watch somebody work that has no care for the environment that they're working in and it doesn't think about the people that they're doing work for even if it's their business if it's their office they got paperwork and their nice computer and everything cover all of that stuff if you're gonna make a mess like try to minimize the mess as much as possible and them watching you they're gonna be like oh my gosh this person's so professional like holy cow i can't believe like most people that come in don't do stuff like this this person's gonna like they're so good at what they do it just gives them confidence when you hand the bill in at the very end that you did a really good job and that you cared and you were professional so just something i recommend in this situation i got to cut that hole all the sheetrock dust fell down onto that blanket i rolled the blanket up and i took the entire mess outside with me i didn't have to clean up i didn't have to vacuum i didn't have to sweep it was very very controlled area of dirtiness that i created all right so that's all i got for you uh please leave some comments below if there's different methodologies that you guys use if there's anything that you would have done instead i love hearing all the different ways that people kind of push logic through to find solutions for things thank you guys so much for the 480 volt members that support me constantly all of these people some of your names have been on there for quite a while don't think that i don't notice really appreciate you guys constantly supporting what i do if you're interested in joining the channel membership there's a little button below click the subscribe button click the like button click the uh notification bell thingy follow me on all the socials love you crazy i'll see you soon this can't music and video

Channel: Electrician U

Views: 312,597

Rating: 4.8659606 out of 5

Keywords: electrician, electrical, electricity, dustin stelzer, electrician vlog, construction, commercial, residential, electrical courses, electrician courses, electrical class, electrician class, electrician school, electrical troubleshooting, electrical troubleshooting basics part 1, service call, national electric code, electric code, electrical safety, troubleshooting electrical circuits, electrician day in the life, electrician basics, electrician training, residential electrician

Id: SiGXBhGtEVM

Length: 30min 7sec (1807 seconds)

Published: Mon May 31 2021