I'm doing some remodeling in my basement and part of that work involves moving a switch. When I was tracing the wires for the switch I found this above my dropped ceiling:
Now, I'm no electrician, but this does not look up to code to me. Further investigation revealed this in another area of the ceiling:
I'm unsure if these junction boxes are installed to code, the one with all the wires hanging out of it looked particularly suspicious to me.
Now, for the first picture, my idea was to install a junction box in between the joists just to the right of the picture (hot wire is coming in in under the joist to the right, the switch & an outlet are toward the camera, and the load the switch controls is off to the left). I'll probably end up re-running a couple runs of wire, but that's not a problem as everything is accessible right now.
My primary question is, does NEC allow for junction boxes installed above a dropped ceiling?
Are the boxes in the second image installed correctly, and if not what is the correct way to install a junction box in this space?