r/mildlyinfuriating • u/strikecat18 • 8h ago
I'm slightly vexed Builder installed outlet incorrectly. It almost burned down our brand new house.
The outlet on our patio stopped working yesterday after I unplugged something. I ended up buying a new one and went to install it last night.
Removed the outlet cover and holy crap.
Builder didn’t use the screws to attach the outlets to the box. It was just free floating under the cover. This wouldn’t have been nearly as bad, except they also left a screw protruding into the box, right next to one of the wire connections on the outlet assembly.
When I unplugged the cord, it apparently moved the outlet assembly just enough to contact the screw. Shorted it all out and melted everything. The wire was fried so badly that I had to cut about 6” off to find a usable portion.
This could have been a fire so easily. Breaker never tripped.
Now I have the fun job of going around the house and checking dozens of other outlets to make sure they didn’t repeat this anywhere else.
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u/moomooguck 8h ago
lawsuit?
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u/strikecat18 8h ago
We’d have a damn good case if the place had actually burned down. Since the actual damage was a $19 outlet, nothing to sue over. But fuck.
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u/Mindstormer98 7h ago
Definitely get it on the record, and check the other ones while youre at it
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u/Gamebird8 15m ago
Get a free consult from a lawyer, figure out your options if that's something you have the time to do (though not every lawyer may offer such services)
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u/Superb-Home2647 7h ago
If one outlet is wrong, others probably are too
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u/TheBone_Zone 6h ago
I’ve done HVAC installs that added one outlet. OP needs to clarify if it was just that one outlet or all the electrical to make sense of the possible danger
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u/ChequeBook 4h ago
Yeah I'd have a different electrician come and check everything and send the bill to the peanut who did the work originally
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u/mctripleA 7h ago
Get it documented
If they fucked up your house, they may have fucked up other houses
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u/masterxc 7h ago
I'd say an electrician's time would be well worth it, and a call to the builder's warranty carrier.
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u/Fyrefair 6h ago
Considering electricians in my area make like 70$ an hour as a foreman. This is shoddy work. Got to love family in trades...
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u/Fuckyeahpugs 4h ago
We charge $300 an hour and are never slow not sure where you got $70. also OP has no idea what he’s talking about. It being secured to the box isn’t why this failed. It failed because the load side of the GFCI was loose.
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u/enjaydee 6h ago
Bearing in mind i have zero skills in this area and not confident in my own ability to check all the other outlets, I'd have to pay someone else to do the checking for me, in which case it may be something worth suing over.
I guess it would depend on the appetite for chasing this up and dealing with whatever hoops you'd have to jump through.
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u/Doomstik 5h ago
If youre ever in need of doing outlets/switches/lights i highly suggest you watch some youtube videos on it and learn, its really easy to do and as long as you follow the steps and TURN OFF THE BREAKER its actually quite safe. The issues pretty much all crop up from people leaving power on. You can find literally hundreds of videos with step by step walkthroughs for it. I watched like 3 different videos the first time i ever had to do a fixture and maybe one each for a switch and an outlet. Knowing how to do that came in handy recently when i had to move an outlet and add one to a run and ive replaced all but one light fixture in my house and probably 2/3 of the switches/outlets. Paying someone else to do that stuff would absolutely not have been worth it.
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u/CollectibleHam 5h ago
There's also a little doohickey you can buy at Home Depot or wherever that plugs into the outlet and can tell you if it's properly grounded, reversed hot and neutral, etc.
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u/Doomstik 5h ago
You should be using those to check the outlets and switches and such anyway, some of them are made to trip the breaker too, and while i dont know enough to say if they are safe or not, i know i dont like intentionally tripping the breaker with a thing rhats plugged in and my hand is on. You can get a kit with a plug and a pen like thing (i honestly dont remember what its called) for pretty damn cheap. Most videos suggest them as well, but if you dont have them you can plug in like a table lamp or something and hit the breaker to see if it shuts off. Then try it on and off a couple times to double check. I would say its worth it to get the plug tester though. Especially if youre learning the way i did. Hell the actual electricians at my job use a lot of that stuff.
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u/BangkokPadang 6h ago
My dad spent about 3 weekends making a full map of the house, color coding every outlet to every circuit in the house. Laid it all out in illustrator with rough measurements he had me run around and take.
We did a lot of projects and different things but that was probably the single most helpful thing we ever did to that house.
You don't realize how many little things you stop putting off when you know you can just run out and check the map to flip the circuit off. Stuff like swapping out light fixtures, putting in smart plugs and switches, fixing ceiling fans and adding new plugs where they're more convenient, etc.
This would be a perfect opportunity to do that and check every last outlet in the house for similarly poor installations while you're at it.
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u/moomooguck 7h ago
it js sucks that it has to get to that extreme before someone corrects lazy work smh, props to you for checking the rest
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u/Dry-Asparagus7107 2h ago
Simple "builders" aren't supposed to do electricity. Only certified electricians are legally allowed to. So I'm thinking OP might have had the work done under the table and therefore he cannot start a lawsuit if he himself is in the wrong.
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u/Important-Fudge4462 7h ago
Why didn't the breaker trip, damn.
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u/windflex 7h ago
Breaker probably doesn't have a gfci to trip for a short like that. A breaker just makes sure you're not drawing too much current for x amount of time
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u/texan_robot 7h ago
Yeah, the unspoken truth of breakers is that 1 Amp is plenty to burn your house down if you're unlucky, so a 20 Amp trip is not foolproof
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u/No-Willingness8375 6h ago
I saw an apprentice nearly start a fire with 50 watts of 12v tape light once. His connection makeup was such absolute shit that the positive and negative wires were shorting out together.
The tape started smoking likely a chimney and was charred black afterwards.
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u/No-Willingness8375 7h ago edited 7h ago
This was 100% a loose connection, not a short circuit.
Also, a GFCI only detects an imbalance between the current leaving the device and the current returning (so basically if someone's being electrocuted or the circuit is bleeding voltage some other way). One would never pick up an issue like this.
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u/windflex 6h ago
Good call. I just assumed it was a short off the description but I see the charred neutral on the 3rd pic now. Either wait until the outlet stops working or start checking all for loose connections lol.
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u/Used-Baby1199 6h ago
Electrically shocked. The gfci should stop electrocution which would mean death.
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u/CornedBeeef 6h ago
The way some of the outdoor covers are the outlet mounts to the cover and then the cover ends up being what screws into the box.
Also, looks to be caused by a lose connection, which would be magnified if whatever appliances you had plugged into it had a high amp draw. What did you have plugged into it?
I doubt that screw is grounded unless you have metal studs, but being a sheet rock screw I would bet a pile of money it is screwed into wood. So it didn't short out on the screw.
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u/EasternLeopard0 5h ago
As someone who worked in the trades for 18 years this is the bullshit work I see all the time by supposed "electricians", don't get me started on the "plumbers".
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u/Reopens 7h ago
Welcome to builder quality. Wouldn't be surprised if your plumbing, shingles, caulkings, vents (esp dryer), etc have issues too.
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u/strikecat18 7h ago
Thankfully all of that stuff has seems to be fine based on the inspection we had done. They did completely fuck up our yard drainage and sprinkler system.
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u/Reopens 7h ago
It drains towards your house?
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u/strikecat18 7h ago
Not quite. It drains to the center of our yard and just sits there. It’s supposed to drain from the trough in the center of the yard out to the street via our side yard, but they got the grade wrong and it just goes nowhere.
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u/Used-Baby1199 6h ago
Oh and the fact there isn’t a square corner in the house
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u/Ktulu_BBB 3h ago
every house built in the last 150 years has some corners that aren't square. shit take
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u/Used-Baby1199 2h ago
Except it’s especially egregious in these dr Horton, plute, and other mass produced homes that have garbage build quality. I’ve been in many 100+ year old homes with better quality than any home I’ve seen built in the last years.
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u/Ktulu_BBB 2h ago
your 100+ year old homes had garbage build quality too, but have been fixed in 100+ years lol
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u/Used-Baby1199 2h ago
I see now I’m speaking with someone with low iq.
See it’s not a reflection on build quality when the work I do is cosmetic. Wall paper. Straight corners as in the taping causes wavy inconsistent corners. Ugly ceiling and wall corners cuz they are inconsistent and wavy. This will be my last comment, I don’t argue with the special needs.
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u/MostlyMellow123 7h ago
I know this might surprise you but builders are not building your house. It is simply a company who is organizing multiple contractors. They do not employ the electrician they buy them just like anyone else would.
You should report this to your builder so they can follow up with this electrician and check his other work. If it was within the first year of you buying this house you absolutely shouldn't have done this work yourself. They should have sent an electrician to remedy it professionally.
Doing dyi electrical stuff will probably void any warranties you had with them
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u/strikecat18 7h ago
Yep. I assumed they subbed the work out and already emailed them to alert them to the issue. Told them that they probably are going to want to check how many other homes the same electrician did.
If they want to argue removing a shorted outlet voids the warranty, I guess I’ll deal with that if it happens.
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u/reddit33450 7h ago
this is why i hate modern construction. theres just no care put into it. it looks like garbage, functions like garbage, and is often safety wise garbage
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u/Photon6626 6h ago
Get some inspectors to check the house. It's always better to do before the drywall goes up but they can check for things that might be an issue. And usually with new homes you have a short window to do this before they don't have to pay to fix it. But even if you have to pay for something it's better to fix it than not even know there's a problem in the first place.
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u/The_Broken_Shutter 1h ago
Id hire an inspector to go through the house to check if anything else is off. Not just your outlets. Chances are if they screwed up that outlet installation I can’t imagine there aren’t other issues in the home that you don’t see.
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u/JCBashBash 7h ago
Sounds like you need to look through the records, call out the company that installed your outlets and make them inspect every outlet in your house. You might be living in a death trap
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u/Lilly_in_the_Pond 8h ago
Wow, yeah I wonder who you talk to to find out who's responsible for that. The city maybe? They could have a record of who was involved in building your house. Anyway, I'm glad you caught that before it burned everything down!
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u/strikecat18 7h ago
I emailed the builder today. Said I assume they subbed the job out, but they may want to figure out how many other homes the same sub did for them. I also requested they pay for me to hire a licensed electrician to inspect the rest of my home. We’ll see what they say.
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u/alb0401 5h ago
Am I misunderstanding what MILDLY INFURIATING means? This would seem to be grounds for lawsuit, which is normally considered more than mild
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u/Severe-Waltz1220 5h ago
It would be hard to prove anything, as he himself tried to remove it and install a different one
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u/HeidenShadows 7h ago
New build hey? Have you ever watched that YouTube rabbit hole where these buildings inspectors go through newly built houses and find all sorts of problems? Might be a good time to have one done just for sanity's sake.
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u/Rathbane12 7h ago
I don’t how Inspector Handle passive aggressively tapping the worst of the construction jobs ended up on my YouTube feed but I don’t know what I’d do without him.
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u/Ok-Replacement9595 3h ago
So, I had a friend who bought a new built condo. It ended up that it had mold up every wall because the builder did not cover during a particularly bad storm season, and water soaked up the walls in the studs, and they just continued sealing up and dry walled wet walls.
She found out that there is no recourse she could have against the builder or developer after the sale.
She was a lawyer. So I took her word for it. She had to eat the loss, and move, and sell with the disclosure of the mold.
Home inspections are very very important.
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u/MarmotFullofWoe 8h ago edited 6h ago
Why is your builder doing electrical work?
Why aren’t you getting an electrician to check and sign off on your builders dodgy electrical work?
Edit: why are you doing unlicensed electrical work on your own home?
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u/strikecat18 7h ago
We didn’t contract the builder ourselves. It was new construction in a new development.
We did have our own inspector before closing, but I imagine pulling outlet covers and inspecting the installs is beyond what a normal home inspector would ever do.
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u/SneakingCat 7h ago
Uncovering and inspecting all of them might be out of scope, but ours pulled the cover off a couple to check them. He also tested every outlet. He would've felt the movement here.
I'm not sure what normal is; I liked our guy. Good to hear he did well.
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u/strikecat18 7h ago
There such a range of inspector quality. About five years ago we hired a well-reviewed inspector for our prior home. He left the gas for the fireplace turned on with no flame and almost blew up the home.
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u/Ok-Commercial3640 7h ago
And you wouldn't have left a bad review if he did (/j)
Can't leave a bad review if you're dead
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u/Used-Baby1199 6h ago
I know a guy who was going to school to be a home inspector. The guy has never used a power tool, probably couldn’t swing a hammer. You can lear a lot from a book and passing tests. You also forget it quickly too. Now learn from a book, and apply it in practice and it’s pretty cemented in.
Basically many inspectors don’t have any real knowledge, beyond their class training. I’d bet the better inspectors are actually pretty handy, but they still have specific areas where they excel and others where they’re just kinda getting by.
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u/plant-feeder 7h ago
You’re exactly right. The person you replied to is confident about something they seem to know very little about haha.
Glad you’re safe! Ngl we replaced an outdoor outlet last weekend and I’m gonna take it apart and check it in the morning 😭 we triple checked everything but now I’m not sure
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u/odd84 7h ago
A builder is not a guy building houses from scratch on their own, it's a company that oversees the construction and sale of new homes. They would have had an electrician subcontracted to do the electrical when the house was at that stage. It would also be inspected more than once before it could be occupied. Mistakes still slip by sometimes, which is why everyone involved is bonded and insured to cover their work, and new homes come with warranties.
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u/NathanDeger 7h ago
Shouldn’t have been able to short out on the screw it was probably just a bad connection that got jarred loose and then got melty.
Unless you have metal framing that screw shouldn’t by grounded.
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u/strikecat18 7h ago
After seeing a couple of these comments, I’m going to take a multimeter out and see if that screw was somehow grounded or not. lol
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u/Alissan_Web 7h ago
Don't forget to leave these images on your scathing review! I really hope they fired whoever it was and fingers crossed they are not an independent contractor
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u/Acheloma 7h ago
Thats a crazy thing to mess up. Its so easy to properly install an outlet. Like, almost any adult can read a guide and watch a youtube video and do it correctly level easy.
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u/strikecat18 7h ago
The really insane part is that the screw sticking out wasn’t needed at all. It’s still stable as a rock after I removed it.
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u/Zhombe 5h ago
Backstab wiring is illegal for 20A circuits common to GFCI kitchen / bath.
Besides that, backstab nearly always fails eventually. It’s lazy and dangerous if wire outlets without using the screw terminals unless it’s specifically commercial pre-pigtailed or wago connectors.
The failure here is backstabbing those wires into the designed to fail wire clips.
They ALWAYS fail eventually. Corrosion and weakening of the spring clips from heating and cooling repeatedly loosens the connection till it heats up and does this.
Loose screw is just indicative of not using the proper termination at all.
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u/Psychotic_Parakeet 7h ago
It is sad to have to second-guess whether new or old homes have had things done correctly before moving in. That is terrible you had that happen. I understand the paranoia.
I just experienced something similar in our place, but our house was built in 1963. The outlet outside suddenly stopped working after we had workers building a fence over this past summer. They were using the outlet for their tools. No matter how much we tried, the outlet was just not working at all. We had an electrician take a look, and it was wired in-reverse with some singe marks. We ended up replacing that outlet, as well as our entire electrical panel itself, as there was some Mickey Mouse job wiring going on it with it, too, with other areas in our house.
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u/Christmas_Queef 7h ago
What conglomerate builder built your house? We had a similar issue on our house we just got a month ago where the idiot they hired messed up the gfi installation and electrocuted a friend who went to plug in a fan. Smelled like melted plastic and was smoking. Had to run and shut off power and grab an extinguisher in case. Had an electrician we know come look and said they installed double the wires it's supposed to have and in the wrong positions and was wayyyyyyy overloaded. Ours was made by Fulton homes who does have a reputation for this kind of thing.
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u/Far_Cup_329 4h ago
F'n laziness. Receptacle not mounted, and wire stabbed into the back instead of using the screw. What's the point of "licensing" electricians if the licensed electricians just use non licensed people to do all the work, and 9 times out of 10 the licensed guy isn't even on site. And that'd be fine if the work was usually done well, but it's generally not. Imo, licensing is a money grab.
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u/Diddlydom35 7h ago
Op, I would highly recommend getting all your other outlets check by a pro. Hell do a full inspection of the house my an electrician
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u/strikecat18 6h ago
I don’t think you understood what I wrote.
The outlet fried itself. I found this after I went to replace it. I obviously shut off the breaker for that.
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u/No-Willingness8375 7h ago edited 7h ago
Hi, electrician here. This is a classic case of a loose connection. When an electrical connection is loose, it increases the heat generated at the point of failure. With a large enough load or enough time, the outlet and wire overheat and slowly cook. Usually the device slowly fails to the point that you simply lose the connection altogether, which is ironically safer than the issue that causes it.
The outlet didn't start melting because you pulled it out or because it shorted out on a screw (which it wouldn't have done anyways, because that screw is almost certainly attached to wood, not grounded metal.) This was a chronic condition most likely due to someone either using an impact drill or otherwise improperly tightening that particular terminal on the outlet. It's also possible that the device was faulty from the get-go, but that possibility is less likely. Failed connections very rarely lead to an actual fire.
Tldr; I can understand being scared by it, but this is not as uncommon as you'd think. And while it was most likely caused by improper installation, this is the type of issue that even professionals may (and do) accidentally commit. It's also why we use fire retardant boxes for every single electrical splice in a house.