How should I connect an outlet to these six wires?

Question

I was expecting 4 wires, white and black on one side, white and black on the other side. Now I see 6 wires, 2 white on one side, 2 black on the other side and a white and a black in the back. How do I fix this?

Answer 1

You have a combo of backstabs and terminal connections. I assume you're replacing the outlet. There are two ways you can go about this:

1. Tie blacks together, whites together, and any grounds together, with wire nuts, and connect a short pigtail from each to the appropriate terminal on the outlet. You can actually tie one set of black and white directly to a terminal (so you'd have one set of wires connected to one set of terminals), and one set of pigtails connected to the other set of terminals.

2. But the easy button here is to purchase a commercial grade outlet such as this one (just used as an example, not necessarily a recommendation). You'll see that each terminal has a clamp under the screw head. That means you can simply clamp the straight end of a wire under each screw. Since there are two sides on each clamp, that means you can connect up to 8 individual wires (4 black, 4 white) to each outlet. But you'll still have to pigtail the grounds, probably (though it doesn't look like you have ground?). The commercial grade outlet will cost a little more, but will save you some nutting and packing the wire in the box should be a bit easier.

Answer 2

Pigtail the three blacks together plus adding a six inch black wire to connect to the receptacle hot screw.

Repeat for the white neutrals, with the short white to the receptacle neutral screw.

Can use the proper size wire nut or one of the newer type lever connectors(wagos).

Answer 3

Backstab connections are bad. It's good you're fixing it. Why? Backstabs have less contact area than screw terminals or wire nuts, so they have more IR drop. Under high load they tend to heat up which can lead to a fire.

The best possible way to fix this is to connect the three leads of each side (hot, neutral) together with a pigtail on a wirenut, then tie the pigtails to the outlet. This means four neutrals to a wirenut, and four hots to a second wirenut. The wirenuts need to be red ones which can hold up to four #12's (yellow ones only go to three #12s.)

(How about WAGOs? I don't care for them. Compared to wirenuts, they're way more expensive, have higher IR drop and take more space. The IR drop issue is especially bad for a through-connect like this socket.)

You may have a bigger problem though. The box looks like it may be too small to fold all those wires plus the new wirenuts and pigtails together back into the box. You might have to put in a deeper box (I'm facing the very same issue in my house, so I feel ya.) You can break out the old box and use a deeper 'old work' type to replace it.

Could you use a 'heavy duty' (commercial) outlet with 'EZ-wire' type screws, and use more than one wire per screw terminal? Yes, that's better than backstab and doesn't take more space. But outlets wiggle a bit in use, which means a screw could come loose and cause problems. If you decide to go this way, make sure the wires are trapped under the plate (face the screw down then insert the wire), and invest in a square-point driver to get those screws nice and tight. Pigtail+wirenut is still more secure.