Wire Identification for DIY Dummies

Neutral wire recoded as hot

Another day, another trip through the back list of posts for our latest intern, and the one turned up a doozy... It seems that the fine folks at Leaf Group agreed with our staff that one of their older posts  one of  heir older posts was no longer acceptable. Unfortunately, they merely assigned a "cleanup team" member to perform a rewrite. The problem? This version's only a little better than the original. That's why the staffers have nominated Shelley Frost to be our DotD, based on her attempt to rewrite "How to Identify Hot & Neutral Electrical Wiring" for Leaf's niche site Hunker.com. Sadly, the original has been "reviewed" by one Jeff Volz, self-described as a "licensed electrician," without significant changes...

Frost pretty much regurgitated the same factoids as Michael O. Smathers did when he "answered" the question the first time, doing only slightly more research than Smathers did way back in 2012. Where  Michael informed his readers that, "AC... circuits have three types of wires," Frost expanded that bit of information to, "The standard wiring configuration uses three cables or wires..." We weren't aware that standard circuits have three "cables," ourselves. Be that as it may, Shelley powered on.
We won't go into any details about electrical circuits here, even though Frost burned up a couple hundred words to explain what circuits are (thank heavens she didn't get into volts, amps, and watts; or we'd still be trying to parse her prose). We originally held Smathers' feet to the metaphorical fire because all the kid had to say was,

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

...which, in the simplest sense, is of course true. Frost, presumably ordered by Leaf to "make it longer," added in more colors:

"Some systems use red wiring for switches. They are usually hot because they carry a current typically [sic]. Some complex systems also use yellow and blue wiring as hot wires for things like three- and four-way switches..."

We have to say that we've never seen blue or yellow wires in a household circuit, only in the wiring harnesses for ceiling fans and for thermostats. She did get the "red" business right, through, something for which we had dinged Mikey.

Where Frost failed her assignment is in two areas. Instead of padding her post with fluff about circuits, Shelley could have served a useful purpose by pointing out two conventions that confuse the bejeepers out of  a lot of people:

• In lamp cord and other two-conductor wiring, the convention is usually to use copper for the hot wire and silver-colored wire for the neutral. Neutral is also usually marked, either with a stripe or ribbing on the insulation.
• In some switched circuits, the white wire has been used as a hot wire. When this has been done, the installer is supposed to recode the white wire with black electrical tape or black paint.

Instead of prattling endlessly about the meanings of "hot" and "neutral," Frost could have actually shared helpful information. She didn't, though, and that's the reason for her Dumbass of the Day award. Maybe next time she should actually do some research instead of just rewriting existing crapola.

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