I was expecting 4 wires, white and black on one side, white and black on the other side. Now I see 6 wires, 2 white on one side, 2 black on the other side and a white and a black in the back. How do I fix this?
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3 Answers
Pigtail the three blacks together plus adding a six inch black wire to connect to the receptacle hot screw.
Repeat for the white neutrals, with the short white to the receptacle neutral screw.
Can use the proper size wire nut or one of the newer type lever connectors(wagos).
You have a combo of backstabs and terminal connections. I assume you're replacing the outlet. There are two ways you can go about this:
Tie blacks together, whites together, and any grounds together, with wire nuts, and connect a short pigtail from each to the appropriate terminal on the outlet. You can actually tie one set of black and white directly to a terminal (so you'd have one set of wires connected to one set of terminals), and one set of pigtails connected to the other set of terminals.
But the easy button here is to purchase a commercial grade outlet such as this one (just used as an example, not necessarily a recommendation). You'll see that each terminal has a clamp under the screw head. That means you can simply clamp the straight end of a wire under each screw. Since there are two sides on each clamp, that means you can connect up to 8 individual wires (4 black, 4 white) to each outlet. But you'll still have to pigtail the grounds, probably (though it doesn't look like you have ground?). The commercial grade outlet will cost a little more, but will save you some nutting and packing the wire in the box should be a bit easier.
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with wire nuts -- out of curiosity, are WAGO connectors legal in the US? When reading on this site I usually hear about "wire nuts" (because it is mostly "biased" towards the US)– WoJCommented Dec 1 at 18:53
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@WoJ - The "National Electrical Code" (NEC) is the US standard for safe electrical installation, published by the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) and recognized across all 50 states as the benchmark for electrical safety in buildings; it is often referred to as NFPA 70 NFPA Homepage. But, US localities can require practices and materials that are more restrictive than the National Electrical Code (NEC) because NEC sets minimum standards, and local jurisdictions can choose to adopt stricter regulations based on their specific needs and conditions. (Wikipedia). Commented Dec 1 at 21:52
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@WoJ - To my knowledge, WAGO connectors (at least some or most model/types) are allowed in the US by NEC Standards, but depending on the locality (State/County/City...). WAGO connectors seem to be very popular among contractors in the US. Commented Dec 1 at 21:57
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WAGO connectors are code... they're just not widely available. The US market does sell push connector splices, and these are usually much cheaper than WAGO, even if they cannot be reused. Commented Dec 2 at 12:58
Backstab connections are bad. It's good you're fixing it. Why? Backstabs have less contact area than screw terminals or wire nuts, so they have more IR drop. Under high load they tend to heat up which can lead to a fire.
The best possible way to fix this is to connect the three leads of each side (hot, neutral) together with a pigtail on a wirenut, then tie the pigtails to the outlet. This means four neutrals to a wirenut, and four hots to a second wirenut. The wirenuts need to be red ones which can hold up to four #12's (yellow ones only go to three #12s.)
(How about WAGOs? I don't care for them. Compared to wirenuts, they're way more expensive, have higher IR drop and take more space. The IR drop issue is especially bad for a through-connect like this socket.)
You may have a bigger problem though. The box looks like it may be too small to fold all those wires plus the new wirenuts and pigtails together back into the box. You might have to put in a deeper box (I'm facing the very same issue in my house, so I feel ya.) You can break out the old box and use a deeper 'old work' type to replace it.
Could you use a 'heavy duty' (commercial) outlet with 'EZ-wire' type screws, and use more than one wire per screw terminal? Yes, that's better than backstab and doesn't take more space. But outlets wiggle a bit in use, which means a screw could come loose and cause problems. If you decide to go this way, make sure the wires are trapped under the plate (face the screw down then insert the wire), and invest in a square-point driver to get those screws nice and tight. Pigtail+wirenut is still more secure.
