ericsherman37
Senior Member
- Location
- Oregon Coast
On Friday, I went on a service call with a Journeyman to a local resort hotel. They have a spa building, with a big outdoor hot tub. The hot tub area has a small building containing all of the pump equipment, as well as an electrical panel. There is a cinder block wall surrounding the area, with a series of outdoor lights mounted every 8 feet or so. Apparently whatever jerk wired it stubbed the lighting wire out of the pump house into the back of a box, and then came out of the box with PVC conduit that went all the way around the hot tub area inside of the cinder block wall. But they didn't install THWN or something similar - no, they installed regular ol' romex in the conduit. So we got called out because the circuit breaker was tripping whenever the lights came on (timeclock controlled). We manually switched the timeclock on, and sure enough, about 30 seconds later, the breaker tripped. We disconnected light fixtures and splices until we isolated the problem - it was somewhere between the wall box and the first fixture. So I when I went over to the box I found it exceedingly difficult to remove the cover - someone had installed a railing right in front of it. I blame this more on the electrician than the railing guy, but the railing guy could have at least called someone up when he installed it and said "hey, uh, I might be blocking access to this J box here..."
You can also see how well aluminum boxes hold up here with the salty ocean air
Anyway, whoever installed the romex in the conduit had stripped like 10 feet of the jacket off for some reason. We tied some conductors to it and tried to pull them through... but the bare ground wire had been arced in half because the hot conductor right next to it had a nick in its insulation... hence the tripping. We yanked the whole thing out and got a fish tape and new conductors through there, but it's just a matter of time before the rest of the wiring starts to fail. Time to write up an estimate for rewiring the whole hot tub area
Anyway, the main complaint here is the railing blocking the J box. And the aluminum corrosion (the inside of the box actually had about 1/4" of oxidized aluminum powder sitting at the bottom). And the use of regular romex in a PVC conduit in a brick wall.
You can also see how well aluminum boxes hold up here with the salty ocean air
Anyway, whoever installed the romex in the conduit had stripped like 10 feet of the jacket off for some reason. We tied some conductors to it and tried to pull them through... but the bare ground wire had been arced in half because the hot conductor right next to it had a nick in its insulation... hence the tripping. We yanked the whole thing out and got a fish tape and new conductors through there, but it's just a matter of time before the rest of the wiring starts to fail. Time to write up an estimate for rewiring the whole hot tub area
Anyway, the main complaint here is the railing blocking the J box. And the aluminum corrosion (the inside of the box actually had about 1/4" of oxidized aluminum powder sitting at the bottom). And the use of regular romex in a PVC conduit in a brick wall.
