Aluminum splice gone bad

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dhalleron

Senior Member
Location
Louisville, KY
aluminum wire.jpg


Not sure if I know how to attach a photo yet.

If the photo works, I found this connection in a crawl space today. It was a dryer circuit. Aluminum to aluminum spliced here with the wrong connectors and no junction box. One other splice was copper to aluminum using butt splices. That connection survived. This splice is at least 17 years old since the owners bought the house and probably older.

They called me because the dryer would not power on. The light would not even work inside. That was because the neutral was broke as shown in the photo, not because of the burned hot wire. The wirenut on the bare wire fell off as soon as I touched it.

See the fiberglass insulation stuck to the burnt wirenut? I pulled this out of an insulated flexible furnace duct under the crawl. It melted the plastic outer shell and found it's way into the fiberglass.

It's all copper now, with no junctions.
 

jim dungar

Moderator
Staff member
Location
Wisconsin
Occupation
PE (Retired) - Power Systems
Looks primarily like poor workmanship.
I don't believe the material had much to do with the fault.

What is that saying, about 'blaming the tools'?
 

dhalleron

Senior Member
Location
Louisville, KY
How could that splice go bad? It was never good to begin with.

Maybe I should have said, bad splice gone badder...

Sure it was poor workmanship.

The bare wire that was the dryer neutral broke off because the conductor had a nick or ring on it from when it was stripped.

The melted wire nut could have covered another broken conductor that just got hot. I don't believe the wire nut was not aluminum rated. When I took the good wire nut off, there wasn't any Noalox and the conductors looked nicked up from stripping or twisting.

I don?t blame the material, I blame the installer. I didn?t have any with me, but I considered using the correct wire nuts and setting a junction box until I found more splices. I just decided to replace it with new.
 

norcal

Senior Member
Poorly done copper or aluminum splice would really not make much difference, still cruddy "workmanship" & a hazard.
 

Cow

Senior Member
Location
Eastern Oregon
Occupation
Electrician
I bet it's been that way for years.

For what they paid for that fix(probably a brother-in-law special) I'm sure they got their moneys worth!:roll:
 

kwired

Electron manager
Location
NE Nebraska
What size conductor is that? To supply typical electric clothes dryer you should need at least 8AWG aluminum. Maybe it just me but it looks smaller than that - just another bad part to add to the original install.
 

dhalleron

Senior Member
Location
Louisville, KY
What size conductor is that? To supply typical electric clothes dryer you should need at least 8AWG aluminum. Maybe it just me but it looks smaller than that - just another bad part to add to the original install.

It was 12/2 aluminum on a 30 amp breaker. Guess I forgot to mention that part. And I was contemplating splicing it properly before I noticed it was too small. It was spliced to #10 copper when it connected to the dryer outlet.

I deal with aluminum so little that I sometimes forget it needs to be sized larger, but the #12 on a 30 amp breaker should have been screaming at me when I pulled into the driveway.

On another job I just ran into some more 12/2 aluminum this weekend on a washing machine circuit, but they did have it on a 15 amp breaker.
 

hurk27

Senior Member
It was 12/2 aluminum on a 30 amp breaker. Guess I forgot to mention that part. And I was contemplating splicing it properly before I noticed it was too small. It was spliced to #10 copper when it connected to the dryer outlet.

I deal with aluminum so little that I sometimes forget it needs to be sized larger, but the #12 on a 30 amp breaker should have been screaming at me when I pulled into the driveway.

On another job I just ran into some more 12/2 aluminum this weekend on a washing machine circuit, but they did have it on a 15 amp breaker.

And the fact that NM has never been allowed where using the grounding conductor as a neutral, if it was SE #8 it would have been fine as existing, see 250.40

Wonder what the rest of the electrical is like?
 
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