Wires in Wall

11 years ago

Hi,

I am new here and am hoping that someone might have some insight into my issue.

We created a hole in the wall between our living room and our hallway. There were two wires that were going to need to be moved and were long enough to put elsewhere so that the pass through was free. One of these wires lead to the plug in the living room and one went to a switch on the wall (that we never could figure out what the switch did). However - when we attempted to move the switch into a junction box (which required us to relocated it) - we found a deeper issue:

In the wall were these two wires attached to another two wires - all electrical taped together and left in the wall without a junction box or access.....We know the one to the switch could be taken off which left us with three wires to deal with. One of these wires is a 14/3 and the other two are 14/2. One of the 14/2 wires is hot on both the black and the white. When ALL THREE are disconnected from each other - the 14/2 with two hots and the 14/3 remain live. The other 14/2 which goes to the plugs is dead.

With all three disconnected and the power back on - everything but the plug in the living room works.

First - is there any logical reason why two wires that remain live whether connected or not - would be attached to each other

Second - What can be done to make sure this is safe? Unfortunately the wires are not long enough at this point to get them all to fit into a junction box

The things on this circuit are stove fan, light above sink and plug with light switch, two hallway lights and their respective switches (not a 3 way), the laundry room light (which has an exhaust fan) and switch and the living room plug and two wall lights and their switch.

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Comments (3)

Ron Natalie
11 years ago
I'm having a hard time following your description but with the exception of certain very old grandfathering for knob-and-tube wiring, all connections must be made within an accessible box of some kind.

Further, there are rules for receptacle placement (no point on a wall in most rooms may be further than 6' from one) so you need to make sure you do have them all functional.

If you can't figure out how to do this correctly, please get professional help.
kudzu9
11 years ago
As ronnatalie suggests, get some professional help. I, too, cannot figure out exactly what is going on, except that someone clearly did illegal and shoddy work in the past. People who are are willing to make splices in the wall like you described are also capable of taking other inappropriate shortcuts and creating dangerous wiring situations. The reason it may be hard to understand why the wiring is functioning like this is that whoever did this hack wiring made some other mistakes. Once you figure out what's ok and what's not, it will be possible to wire it properly. Things like too short wires can usually be resolved without pulling out the existing wiring: you simply install another junction box at an intermediate point and add a segment of new wire that runs from the new box to the one downstream of it.
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Bruce in Northern Virginia
11 years ago
I have one light fixture where they ran power to the fixture, then 14/3 from the fixture to a receptacle, then ran 14/2 from the receptacle up to a light switch. At first I thought it was installed for a 3 way switch, but I found it was simply a way to save a little bit of wiring.

The way its wired you can switch the light switch and it does not affect the receptacle, but it switches the light off. Basically they used the red wire in the 14/3 to connect a switch loop for the lights and pass it through the receptacle between the switch to the fixture. It took me a while to figure out, but it works correctly.

Figuring out someone's old wiring is often an adventure, especially if they don't seem to have any knowledge of either code or best practices.

Bruce