Weird house electrical problem

Nice rpc

 

That right angle fitting going into the 3Ø panel though. Ugh.

 

Homeowners don't usually have a KO set to punch the bottom of the loadcenter with...and he didn’t want to have the liquidtite looking like an upside down question mark.

 

Kinda on topic...... What do you do when weird shit is happening and you find out the all the wiring is aluminum?

Our place has all aluminum wiring and one of the plugs got so hot a while back that it burnt up the paint around the outlet. Nothing was even plugged into the damn thing. I removed the outlet and just shoved the wires back into the wall. Not sure what to do with this mess.

 

https://www.kinginnovation.com/products/20/3-port-alumiconn

These are the splice blocks that will deal with Aluminum wiring safely. There is a 2-port version as well.

Ideally, you'd rip out all the AL wiring you can and replace with modern copper (NM-B), but that may be impractical.

The problem with aluminum wiring is two-fold:

1. the surface of the aluminum oxidizes rapidly, and Aluminum oxide is more of an insulator than a conductor. This extra resistance causes splices and connections to devices to heat up.
2. when joining Aluminum and copper in a traditional twisted connection splice, the two metals expand at different rates due to the heating effect of the current flowing through the splice. This causes splices to become loose over time, causing excess heating.

The Alumicon splice blocks address the dis-similar metals issue with one wire per slot on the block. They also allow stubbing out copper connections to devices or new wiring that is copper. Properly prepping the aluminum wire with anti-ox compound before splicing will help with the oxidation issue.

To protect against loose connections, you could switch out your breakers to Combination Arc-Fault breakers. Not cheap, but they will detect sparking and maybe cut off the circuit before a fire starts.

Because of the problems with heating of bad splices being a fire hazard, I'd bring in a professional for remediation.

 

I got nothing to add.

Aluminum romex is the debbil.

I can barely stand to use aluminum service conductors.

 

Is there a reason to still use aluminum?

 

It's cheaper than copper.

There is no other reason. Copper works better, lasts longer and is overall much better.

Aluminum wiring started to be used because the cost of copper had gone way up in the 1950's. It soon became evident it was not suitable, but the manufacturers have fought to preserve their markets. They have good lobbyists.

Aluminum wiring should be fully banned, but to the best of my knowledge, in the US only the Chicago Electrical code fully bans Aluminum wiring.