Either "Old School" or "Jury Rigged"-I don't know

[K8MHZ]

This is how I deal with this.

White wires on breakers get re-identified before they are removed( I use red tape, it shows up real well ). I take a book of wire numbers and make sure that each circuit conductor is marked before it's removed. With new panel everything is placed back exactly where it was in the old panel.

Once you have changed out the panel any trouble -shooting that is needed is a seperate charge as this is not part of the panel change.

A switch leg make up in the panel is not that odd. Where you would normally see this is where a time clock was added to control a lighting circuit.

For the white wires, I use red tape for the left hot conductor circuit and blue for the right, using a meter to verify before I disconnect. I've seen some screwy 240 volt circuits bugged into panels and it's way quicker be red and blue verified when it's time to try to make them work after they have been pulled out and put in a new panel.

 

[kwired]

Yup, this came to me last night while I was thinking about it. Maybe in order to put in a safety shut off switch in the house to shut off the furnace they ran a romex from the fed pac panel up to the switch in the house. The romex going up into the house is connected to the breaker (white wire), goes up to the switch back down on the black wire in the panel then back out on another romex to the furnace to feed power to it. But why would they put it on a two pole 15 amp breaker; reason, they did not have two single pole breakers maybe. That two pole breaker has that one white wire and another white wire on it; don't know where the other one goes though. Instead of doing the switch leg connections in the panel why did they not do it in a junction box outside the panel? Odd!!

Odd to you maybe, nothing violates code here, except maybe use of white wire or identification of it where it is allowed to use the white, and you can straighten that out with minimal cost/effort when you do your job. Nothing prohibits splices in a panelboard cabinet.

If you do run into something unexpected while working on the job, bring it up to the owner/contractor. Then offer a price to make it right. If they decline I guess you could put it back the way it was and make sure you have documentation of the notice and the fact they declined to do anything with it.

 

[K8MHZ]

I fully agree. I have seen circuits fed with old lamp cords and extension cord and all sorts of rigging.

I have it at my own house. Well, my own garage, anyway. The driveway light is on a tripod on top of the garage and fed with orange extension cord. It's had to have been that way for 20 or 30 years. I don't like heights so my plan is to leave it like it is until the light fails, and when I go up to put in a new LED fixture I will run proper conductor. The cord comes through a hole in the wall and to a box about 10 feet up. NM from there.

Every circuit in the garage, that light included, is on GFCI.

When I first moved back here, the overhead feed to the garage was NM on some kind of cobbed messenger wire. I replaced that with a drop of triplex a friendly POCO linesman left in a swamp on a job I did a while back.

I just looked at a house a friend of mine bought and it has an ancient cartridge fuse service in it. A small 30 amp sub is fed with #10 wire tapped off the 100 amp main fuse. I couldn't tell the brand of the panel because there is a water pipe in front of it and you can only get the door open enough to get to the fuses, not to stick your head in and read the label.

One re-mod we did had a circuit fed from both ends on different breakers. Lucky we didn't connect them 240 and ruin something electrical, and instead just got shocked because we didn't realize that one of the cables coming out of the panel (not connected yet) was hot from turning on what we thought was a different circuit.