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Monday, October 26, 2020
Question:
Greetings,
Is it common practice for residential guys to not make up their receptacle boxes? If they have only two pieces of 12/2 NM Cable coming into the box, they’ll twist the ground wires together with a green wire nut and then put both hots on the two hot screws on the plug and both neutrals on the neutral screws of the plug. Is this code compliant?
A
Answer:
Hello Mr. Code,
Nice! We are not sure what you mean by “its common practice for residential guys to not make up their receptacle boxes.” If you mean splice the conductors and pigtail to the device, this is good practice but not a requirement except where 300.13(B), in multiwire circuits requires that the continuity of the grounded conductor shall not depend on device connections. In this application, the grounded conductor must be spliced, and a jumper run from the splice to the device terminal or the neutral could be looped. The purpose is to permit a device to be removed without interrupting the continuity of the neutral, which is a multiwire circuit that could cause voltage problems on utilization equipment. See Section: 300.13(B)