Unusual situations discovered during service upgrades

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jeff48356

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Livonia, Michigan
Have any of you ever discovered unusual (or dangerous) electrical situations when doing a service upgrade at someone's house? Here's TWO for the record book, on a job I did today in my neighborhood. The old panel was a Pushmatic, probably installed in the 70's. The original panel was actually fuses from when the house was built in 1962.

The first thing I discovered was that the meter cable (#2 SEU) was the original, so it was already in bad shape outdoors. But the idiot who installed the Pushmatic, rather than replacing the meter cable, spliced three conductors OUTSIDE of the panel using split-bolts and friction tape to extend those from the original SEU because they must have been too short to reach the lugs. Easy fix since I replaced the meter cable as should have been done before. The second thing was that the guy who lives there now had wired a 240V electric dryer using a 30A breaker on #12 copper-clad cable! That crap is only supposed to be good for 15A if I'm not mistaken.

So my question to you is, what would you do if you run into situation #2? Would you reconnect the dryer using a 15A 2-pole breaker (which would probably trip frequently) or would you rewire the circuit using #10-3 Romex? If the latter, how would you go about adding an appropriate cost onto the bill, especially considering the price of Romex these days?
 
I don't reconnect anything I deem dangerous. In the case of breaker being too big for the wire, I downsize it without saying anything. In the case where the wire to too small for the device (if I happen to notice), I inform the HO of the problem and tell them how much extra it will be to replace the wire. Same for open j-boxes, flying splices, ground being used as a hot or neutral, etc.
 
I have one from a job where I did not upgrade the service.

I was working on a newly acquired rental house that had failed a pre-tenant inspection. I was adding two circuits for kitchen receptacles and a circuit for bathroom receptacle. When I opened up the one hundred amp panel, I saw that it was being fed from the meter with number 10 THHN that was already cooked pretty good.

Not related to electrical, but on the same house while I was running those home runs, I noticed that the flue pipe for the furnace and water heater was just stubbed into the attic.

New owner didn't seem overly concerned about either one of them 😠😡🤬
 
One time I pulled a old meter off a wall being feed with 2 4” pvc and it just fell over so I dug it up. Come to find out they used 5”pvc underground and then used rubber plumbing fittings to join to 4” to the 5”. It was not a fun night started snowing too
 
Triplex coming into large house turned apt. building. One leg cut and folded back at the weather head. #10 coming out of the meter box into a nearly 100 year old 25 amp disconnect with four fuses in it. Yes, four fuses for a single 25 amp circuit. From that disconnect 2/0 (IIRC) feeding a 200 amp panel with the two hot sides of the panel jumpered together so both sides had 120 volts. No 240 coming into the building, of course. The four fuse disconnect is now a part of my collection of oddities. As is a part of the triplex that was feeding the house with a lightning hole blown through it. There were several such holes in that drop for some reason. POCO shut down the road and replaced the triplex while we fixed the service.
 
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