new rear deck

A new rear deck installed on a house in 1996 damaged

Electrical wiring, which did not cause problems

Until the new kitchen was installed in 2003?

By Nick Markowitz Jr.

Electrical Contractor –

I received a call from a Carpenter friend who does home remodeling work. He was renovating a Kitchen which had a dining room beside it which went out onto an elevated wooden deck when all of a sudden he lost most of the power at the outlets in the kitchen and some lights he checked for the usual Tripped breaker, GFCI etc but he could not restore power. I arrived and determined that the neutral wire in the Romex wire had been broken some where along its path to the kitchen.

But where ? We were able to cut some drywall out behind the new cabinets and follow the wire were it went down into the basement. The only problem was the basement ceiling was solid swirled plasterboard. After putting my tracer tone tester on the wire we were able to determine that the wire had snapped between the floors but how.

As we started looking around we noticed in one of the interior wall studs how far the lag bolts holding the deck plate on came into the house it was after we went outside and looked under the deck we saw that one of the bolts was directly in the path the Romex wire had taken to the basement. It appears the bolt went it was inserted had struck the Romex wires neutral conductor but had not completely snapped it off .

So when my friend started the renovations in the kitchen the vibration finished of the break started back when the deck screw struck the wire in 1996.

We were able to obtain the neutral from a near by circuit and turned the 2 circuits into a 3 wire Edison circuit so we did not have to cut the ceiling open, and we permanently disconnected the bad neutral section. Luckily when the screw went into the Romex wire

It had not bothered the ground wire and we could still use it of course had the hot wire been struck there could have been a completely different result with the wire strike resulting in an arc fault type condition which could have resulted in a fire. This once again shows how fires can easily be started by renovations to a house when contractors are not careful when they are working around existing wiring and why Arc Fault breakers are a good investment to help prevent fires.