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I was working in the gas station and had a scorched outlet. I removed the outlet. The white wire was jumped over to the bare copper wire. I have never seen this before, so I called an electrician. He said it's wrong and someone didn't know what they were doing.

So I wired new outlet correctly and plugged in my tester. And it said wired correctly. Then about four hours later the entire circuit failed but didn't trip breaker. What is going on and should the owner be concerned? I told him any time you lose power to a circuit and the breaker doesn't trip you should be very concerned. So what is going on?

isherwood
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Paul
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2 Answers2

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The only reason for someone to jump ground to an outlet is that something happened to the neutral wire and they didn't want to find the problem.

Given that it lasted 4 hours after proper repair at the outlet, there is a loose connection or broken wire somewhere. Might be causing sparks somewhere.

Sparks and gas usually do not play nice together, but are fun to watch on YouTube.

As a unlicensed electrician, you, and the owner have no business touching it. Lawyers like people like you doing stuff like this. It's an easy payday for them.

isherwood
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crip659
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Screw torques.

Working at a gas station you likely understand the importance of screw torques. What happens when someone torques their cylinder head bolts "by feel" instead of with a torque wrench? Yeah.

The same issue applies to screw terminals on the main electric conductors on panels -- we know that, and electricians use torque wrenches for that. However, recent science has proven it also matters on the little stuff!

So the burn-up of the first outlet might have been a sloppy socket (you'd know)... but it also might have been improper torque on the terminal screws.

And overheat of your replacement outlet might be the very same thing. Or it could be a similar failure elsewhere in the circuit. Presuming the same "last guy" did all the outlets.

Broken neutral?

The arrangement of jumpering neutral to ground is called "bootlegging ground". It is done for one of two reasons: a) the socket doesn't have any grounding and they need to fool a 3-light tester into thinking it's grounded.* Or b) the junction box is grounded, (and I would expect gas stations to use metal conduit which provides the ground path)... and the neutral wire BROKE. So they are stealing neutral from ground just to get the socket working again. And the burn-up was unrelated.

It's quite likely you wired it up correctly, using the neutral as intended, and then the same neutral wire failure that caused them to cheat before, happened to you. The right answer is to hunt down that neutral wire failure. The neutral bar in the service panel is a good place, but really, at this point we are beyond "simply changing a receptacle" and deep into where a licensed electrician MUST be used owing to the commercial rules.

* This is a bad idea where GFCIs are concerned, because it will break the GFCI's protection.

Harper - Reinstate Monica
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