Hi all. New here.

[Bladnaster]

welcome to the world of, some do it right, many do not.

my new home by Pulte hired what i thought was a good sub. while doing a tile backsplash in my kitchen i heard a little "bzzz,,,, bzzzz,,,, bzz", i ear'd it down, was coming from an outlet. i thought maybe it got damaged from use but then realized its an outlet that rarely gets used, so then i thought it might be a bad piece of hardware..... turns out the idiot person who put them in didnt tighten the screws tight, on every outlet in the kitchen!! rubber gloves, line screw driver, i tightened every one of them. i have yet to check the whole house but i suspect there are more....

Yeah, I've had a pretty large majority of the plugs that I had to open have the wires fall off. Multiple reasons and possible combinations. Floppy outlets, poor connections in general, (wires stripped too short and barely under) and just outright lose connections. Now whether the screws came lose because of time and the sloppy work or they were never tightened properly to begin with.....just not sure.

 

[Bladnaster]

Also, this is one of the boxes that I was talking about that goes straight through the wall between rooms. As can hopefully be seen, the cable enter's the box, run's directly to the back of one outlet then they come back out of that outlet cutting across to the other outlet. Problem being, because of the poor wiring, work on one plug and the wires can and have pulled out of the other plug. As a side note, these are the only boxes that are actually flush outside of a couple plastic boxes that they put in which I will have to rip out. I do not like this setup at all.

 

[kwired]

Facelift sounds about right and all I can say is wow. Its kind of scary that they can preform the amount of work they did and possibly not require a permit. It would make sense though. I can see no way possible that this place could have passed. Of course I'm still puzzled at how this place passes its yearly inspection. Outside of the flopping outlets, Ive come across many reverse polarity and a bunch of open grounds.

Next question, once again in regards to hospital grade receptacles. This question may sound a bit silly.

There are hospital grade receptacles scattered throughout this building. I feel that if this place does not require these receptacles, that they should be removed and replaced with unmarked/normal receptacles. The reason I feel this way is that these receptacles are required in certain instances and required to be wired in a certain way. To my mind, this could be misleading and a misrepresentation.

So, can a hospital grade receptacle be used in this situation but have it wired as a normal receptacle. In other words, could I just take a grounding pigtail, attach it to the box and grounding screw, and be done with it, or am I correct in that I should pull them and put in normal receptacles?

There is no restrictions to using a hospital grade outlet outside of an art 517 application. They are typically priced high enough though it generally doesn't happen. Sometimes I see them in health care facilities in places they are not required - possibly because someone wasn't all that certain if it was required or not, or the maintenance man simply didn't know any better and replaced with a HG.

 

[Bladnaster]

There is no restrictions to using a hospital grade outlet outside of an art 517 application. They are typically priced high enough though it generally doesn't happen. Sometimes I see them in health care facilities in places they are not required - possibly because someone wasn't all that certain if it was required or not, or the maintenance man simply didn't know any better and replaced with a HG.

Ok, that sounds good. TYVM.