BX cable

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The reason I'm asking is I was working on this office add-on and the lighting circuits were ran in bx. I had never seen it before but I identified it from the alum wire wrapped around the outer jacket and no egc. These runs were well over 15 feet long and the master wanted to reuse them. So if that is a code violation this guy obviously didn't get a permit therefore there will not be an inspection. I cut the ones that were hanging out of the ceiling and threw them away. I'm sure he was the EC that built the place originally. Needless to say I don't work for him anymore. This is only one of many discussions we had over right and wrong.
 
BX is just a slang term for Type AC cable, and it's still manufactured today and recognized by the NEC, although it has almost completely fallen out of favor for new installations. The small aluminum wire inside the jacket is a bonding wire to bond together the metal spirals of the jacket, to reduce the impedance of it during fault clearing. The jacket itself is the EGC. The bonding wire can be cut off or "back wrapped" once the jacket is stripped.

There's no 6' restriction with Type AC cable.
 
brian john said:
And recycling is the preferred disposal method PLEASE.
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In today's market, anybody that's throwing anything made of any sort of metal in the dumpster needs their head examined. Even if you don't want to take the time to sort or skin out the wire, you still get paid a mint for it. It's even worth making a scrap steel pile now, when in the past it was hardly worth saving steel.
 
I dont keep steel for myself, I usually find a spot outside the dumpster to lay it out for the scrappers, it is usually gone by the end of the day.
 
I was on a job one morning early and there were two men fishing MC, AC out of the dumpster and filling up the back of a pick up.

When I was an apprentice if you took copper you were a thief if you took aluminum you were laughed at. I would fill my pickup to the top with large AL all the time. I was laughing at them with when I would get around $100.00 for a pickup load of AL. This was early 70's.
 
The old BX cable that I've run into was installed around the 1930's guessing but it was made of steel and did not have the bonding wire that the AC cable of today has.There were a lot of problems with the cable. The impedance of the outer sheath could reach high levels and not clear the overcurrent device. I had a service call in an old house where they couldn't turn the hall light off. Took the wires off the switchs and the light stayed on. I went into the attic and found an piece of bx that was smoking and partially burnt. Cut out burnt bx and repaired switching worked fine. This was a Chicago 3-way or Carter system fed by 2 seperate circuits . Conductor faulted to sheath cleared one fuse burnt conductor in half and welded to sheath. The sheath was now a current carrying conductor and the impedance was so high that it acted like a heating coil.
 
mdshunk said:
In today's market, anybody that's throwing anything made of any sort of metal in the dumpster needs their head examined. Even if you don't want to take the time to sort or skin out the wire, you still get paid a mint for it. It's even worth making a scrap steel pile now, when in the past it was hardly worth saving steel.
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Indeed. I'm amazed at how even small amounts of scrap can get turned into a good amount of money very quickly.

And as others have said, any thing that ends up in a dumpster likely won't stay there for long, or the disposal company themselves will sort it and take out the recyclables.
 
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