Joshua Peterson with Peterson Electric. Today, I want to talk to you about aluminum and copper. I don’t know if you were asleep during science class in 7th grade, but I was when the teacher was talking about the conductivity of different metals and precious metals. What we are dealing with today is dissimilar metals. I want to show you a simple way to know in your home. You can do it at your risk or I tell you should have a professional do it. You can kill the power outside, put on some gloves, take your cover off with 4 screws. In your home, you can see copper on all these breakers. This is all copper in this home as far as the branch circuits right here. These are the feeders right here. These feeders can be either aluminum or copper to code today you can still have aluminum. This is 50 amp feed to the range. It is called a braided neutral. See the difference between aluminum and copper. If you have aluminum on your dryer, your AC or range, you are okay. Those are still code. Typically, if I was re-wiring a house and they paid extra money, I would give them copper. All the branch circuits, which are your smaller breakers, your 120 volt for your lights, power outlet, your equipment, some of your small appliance, as far as your dishwasher, disposal, refrigerator, these should be in copper. If they aren’t then this when you can go into a panel and see if there is aluminum all around it, the whole thing, then you have aluminum in your home. Don’t be deceived if you have a brand new panel outside and it has copper in it, and somewhere in your house you have a little box like this. You might actually have aluminum junction in the garage, in the landing of a stairway, sometimes in hallway or even in a kitchen. That is where they junction the new aluminum to copper. That is where you want to look for your hot spot, according article 110.14, it talks about the difference of the Celsius rating on the materials and chapter 300 talks about the dissimilar metals.
