In the past, Aluminum wiring on aluminum-rated outlets was "good". Standard outlets? that was a call to 9-1-1 in the not so distant future.
Is aluminum even used in household wiring these days?
It may not be used for branch circuits, but at least here (Nova Scotia) it's allowed to feed sub-panels. When I upgraded the electrical in my house a couple years ago, the old main panel became a sub-panel, fed from the new 200A main panel. The electrician asked if I wanted to save a few bucks and use aluminum instead of copper for that 60A feed (it had been a 125A panel, but most of the heavy loads were moved to the new panel). I declined, and spent the extra for copper.
Maybe I'm just overly cautious. After all, the feed in from the street is aluminum, but it's terminated with some serious crimps. It's also now a shorter run, directly to a pole with the transformer on it, so that's another plus in my book.
As for re-torqueing screw terminals, when I worked in transmitter maintenance at my old day job, it was a once-a-year routine item to re-torque every power terminal in the various transmitters. We weren't sophisticated enough to actually use a torque driver for the job, but you could often get a fraction of a turn on some connections. And this was often equipment that had already been in service for 10 or more years. I recall one connection in an electrical panel that was loose and got hot enough to make the 200A 3-phase breaker trip. The heat caused the copper wire to lose its temper (and scorch the insulation), so that piece of 250 MCM had to be replaced. We called in an industrial electrician for that job.
One more thought on this topic: Bolt-in vs. snap-in breakers in portable panels. I've always used Square-D QO (rather than QB) panels for my portable stuff, partly because it's cheaper and easier to find, but it also seems that the spring fingers might maintain contact on the bus bars better than screws, which could in theory, loosen up. Does anybody have have any opinions on this, or better yet, data?
GTD