Re: House wiring in emt?
I guess it's perspective. Scott, [by the way a fine contractor], russ, and myself have been brought up, I believe, with EMT pretty much the standard. You learned how to install that . And as a local industry, we do it proficiently and, generally, safely. If we were told the wire the same structure in NM, we could easily be blown away by someone that was raised on that.
The safety and integrity of any electrical system can be compromised by poor or improper installation. But, tonyi is also correct. Many times, from people in other trades calling themselves contractors. How many of us have come behind the work of a HVAC contractor or a remodeling contractor? Sometimes what we find is absolutely stifling. Yet there's a great deal of last-guy-in syndrome; most homeowners only know of the fact that they have a nice fixture, or an outlet where they need it. Never mind that it may have been installed without due care. Tonyi is also correct in that homeowners can be ignorant as to how they impact they electrical systems they own.
It is my opinion that it does come down to cost; although I have no direct statistics on this point. And I can't, with unflappable certainty, say that it is more on the material end, the labor end or both. Irrespective, I feel that we can all say that cost is the predominant factor in construction, as in most things. How many of us, those who are old enough to have memory, notice things being made cheaper, or with a tin-e-er, or in some way giving us pause for thought as to they way things used to be? I digress.
Once the home is constructed, we too have to fall back to some sort of flexible wiring method for moves, adds, or changes. In our area it is usually BX, [AC cable] or Greenfield, [flexible metal conduit]. I guess it's more of a secondary material, whereas NM is going to be used for both new work and well as add ons. Yes you can drag additional circuits through EMT, but from there you probably have to go fish.
Big John, while we try to keep our pipe runs neat, there can be a good deal of liberties taken with EMT, yet somehow meet code. New construction can be a real eye-opener. One of my biggest eye-openers came on my very first inspection. I was in a million dollar home, in a golf course community. I always believed, naively so, that on a million dollar home, you would get a "better" electrician. Nope! It all comes down to the electrician, and how much pride they take.
We may be looking at this through either end of a straw so to speak. I mean that we see this from our own perspective, knowing what we do, doing things the way we do, what is new can be foreign. Since NM seems to be the predominant wiring method throughout the country, and has been so for a long time, it is what is accepted. Here, it's just EMT. Will that change? I don't know.
but it seems strange that folks with little to no experience with NM believe it to be such a poor method.
