Identifying Electrical Wires for the Dummy Handyperson

Sheathed cable electrical wiring

We're pretty much of the opinion that if you want reliable information about the many systems around your home, you should ask someone who's actually worked on those systems. Even then, you may need to take the information with a grain of salt: just because plumbers charge $119/hour doesn't mean they're always right. It's for darned sure, though, that just about anyone who's done electrical work more complicated than installing a ceiling fan knows more about wiring than your average college history major – but that didn't stop eHow.com contributor Michael O. Smathers from pretending enough expertise to tell readers "How to Identify Hot and Neutral Electrical Wiring"¹ (now at Hunker.com).

Smathers, however, should have kept his mouth (or his laptop) shut. That's because, even though he was sufficiently good at general research to come up with this introduction:

"Household AC (alternating current) circuits have three types of wires: hot, neutral and ground. The hot wire carries a constant flow of electricity from the power source to the load. The neutral wire completes the circuit from the load back to the power source, and the ground wire dissipates excess current into the ground rod..."

...he clearly didn't know what he was talking about, and as a result, he did a lousy job (but he still got paid by Demand Media, and isn't that what's important?). We say that because, irrespective of the word-count limitations of his introduction, claiming that the ground wire "dissipates excess current into the ground rod" may look correct, but it merely skirts the issue of what a ground circuit does... and it gets worse.

What Smathers is supposed to be doing is helping people identify electrical wires. Even assuming, as Mike did, that the OQ meant "in a household circuit," his final answer is, at best, incomplete. When you ask a question of someone who has to look up the answer, you get partial answers like this: "Look at the wiring connected to the electrical outlet. The wire connected to the smaller side of the socket should always be the hot wire. The wire connecting to the larger rectangular side of the socket should correspond to neutral." We presume that by "smaller side" and "larger rectangular side," Smathers is referring to the lengths of the slots in a polarized outlet. Assuming the house is wired correctly (which isn't always a safe assumption), that's fairly close to true. Of course, not all outlets are polarized... not to mention that Smathers says zip about the ground wire, which would be connected to that bottom, roundish slot. And what does that mean for an electrical switch? A light fixture? and so on...

Smathers also educates his readers about wire colors:

"Generally, black should correspond to the hot wire and white to neutral."

Yeah, generally – but not always. Do you want to risk electrical shock to be certain Mike's right? And what about red wires? where do they fall on the hot-neutral spectrum? green wires? bare wires? white wires with a tag of black electrical tape?

Yeah: we're going to take the word of a college student about electrical wiring. But if we do, it's going to be one who knows what he's talking about, which isn't Smathers. That's because Mike's dangerous stupidity makes him precisely the kind of person to whom we award the Dumbass of the Day.

¹ The original has been sent to Leaf Group's rewrite team, but can still be accessed using the Wayback machine at archive.org. Its URL was   ehow.com/how_7842168_identify-hot-neutral-electrical-wiring.html

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