Hi, this is Joshua Peterson with Peterson Electric in Fort Collins, Colorado. We got called out on a management issue for a tri-level house, which has aluminum wiring & it is in the 70s. The concern was all the basement outlets were out. We spent about 4 hours tracing through the circuit because the circuit traveled from the downstairs living room to the upstairs living room. Once we were able to identify what was going on, back then they feed power into the light & then down to the outlet. Finally, we were able to identify the circuit that we thought was hot from light down to the outlet. It was showing no continuity on our meter between that cable & between the white & black, black & white, the ground & white, ground & black. Then we also took voltage from another spot & put power on it, to see if anything would react & there was nothing. What we ended up finally finding out was the back outlet was down in the tri-level. We cut the drywall in the inside & we cut it on the upside here, we were able to find our hot spot. This is so rare that I can actually prove what is going on. I cut the drywall & I found it. Inside this cable jack, the wires were heating up & you can see it baking & what I think happened is that we had a space heater put on here. Something happened inside the conductor cable. We are going to look a little deeper. I think possibly, there might have been a nail or screw that was driven into it. The reason why I think it is that I did find a spot where there was a bit of a whole, so as we look for that, we are going to try to see what the source was. What has happened is it completely broke in half somewhere. That is the problem with aluminum with copper wouldn’t do that. You probably have only one conductor break, but when all three of them break like that, it is definitely a sign of aluminum. How you know it is aluminum is right there. The best way to tell if you have aluminum is to get inside your panel. I will have my video person show you. You open up your dead front cover on your panel & you know that you don’t have any sub-panels in the home because the meter is on the outside, right in there, there is aluminum all along the neutral bus bar & the ground bus bar, as well as on the breakers. Thanks for joining us! We will see you next week.
