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[Stephen Swaffer]

The pictures are of two "code clusters" I personally ran across in the last week.  While it is obvious in these pictures that the white wires were not neutrals, that might not have been so obvious in the boxes at the other end of the wires.  One pic is from an ag site the other from an industrial site quite some distance away.  The one I find interesting is the terminal with a black, white and a gray wire on it.  Since the gray is the newest, I am thinking the electrician that installed it did not know whether to use white or black, so he split the difference?  My meter says this terminal is actually a neutral.

Assuming a white wire is a neutral on either of these sites could prove painful or worse!

Service I changed out today (installed in 1956) had two red "hots" and a black neutral.

Keep a meter handy! 

[Mike Sokol]

The pictures are of two "code clusters" I personally ran across in the last week....

Keep a meter handy!

Priceless 

[frank kayser]

So, did you sepia tone the top photo, or are all the wires actually a "neutral" beige?      Seriously? 


Middle - I like the way they totally bypassed the lower fuseholder and hotwired the whole circuit.   


I would ask "what were these folks thinking?" but that would be assuming facts not in evidence. 


Expedience is becoming a bad word.  I'm sure you real sparkys see this sort of thing all too regularly. 


Be safe.  Assume nothing.
frank

[Stephen Swaffer]

So, did you sepia tone the top photo, or are all the wires actually a "neutral" beige?      Seriously? 
 

Be safe.  Assume nothing.
frank

I would have corrected rotation on photos before I resorted to sepia tone-that is true color!

[Jonathan Johnson]

One pic is from an ag site

Probably wired by the farmer. He had no idea how much wire he needed for the project, so rather than trying to guess how much of each color he needed, and not wanting to "waste" money buying several spools of which he wouldn't use even half of each, he just grabbed a spool off the shelf at the local big box and it happened to be white.

Last summer I helped my father-in-law redo some wiring on some grain bins on his farm. They weren't as bad as your pictures portray. The auger motors were hard wired; we changed them to cord-and-plug so he could more easily move the augers to other bins (more bins than augers). Last fall he was emptying a bin and one of the motors went up in smoke. Had nothing to do with the wiring we had done; probably due to weather and dust exposure.

P.S. -- I'm not a sparky, but I do things by the book.

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