Mr. Serious
Senior Member
- Location
- Oklahoma, USA
- Occupation
- Electrical Contractor
I built one service recently with aluminum wires in the riser and weatherhead, and copper wires going from the meter into the panel. I became aware that for the neutral conductor, the meter socket does not have two completely separated lugs for incoming and outgoing wires, so the incoming and outgoing wires could touch each other, end to end, when inserting them into the lugs. The meter can I was using is very similar to this one.
So I thought: that can't be dual-rated, can it?, Can you put an aluminum wire under one lug, and a copper wire under the other, for the incoming and outgoing neutral wires in the meter socket? Does it matter that the dissimilar metal wires could touch each other end to end after the lugs are tightened? It seems like a pretty common situation you would have wires of both materials in there, such as when the electrician runs the wires to the panel, but the utility runs the incoming wires. Usually you don't even think about it, but this time I was thinking about it because I ran both sets of wires.
So I thought: that can't be dual-rated, can it?, Can you put an aluminum wire under one lug, and a copper wire under the other, for the incoming and outgoing neutral wires in the meter socket? Does it matter that the dissimilar metal wires could touch each other end to end after the lugs are tightened? It seems like a pretty common situation you would have wires of both materials in there, such as when the electrician runs the wires to the panel, but the utility runs the incoming wires. Usually you don't even think about it, but this time I was thinking about it because I ran both sets of wires.
