Great work and getting things working again. I personally would not have a problem buying a house with aluminum wiring if the price was right, even with a thorough home inspection, being a journeyman myself I would go through every device and every junction to make certain the proper terminations were made, and correct any deficiencies. Because single strand aluminum wiring was only used for a brief period between about 1965 to 1973 give or take a few years due to the severe copper shortages combined with the post war housing boom causing copper to be very expensive if not impossible to obtain, it's very common and unfortunate to see copper and aluminum spliced together with standard wire nuts, and for those unaware, copper and aluminum are dissimilar metals and can undergo galvanic corrosion when in direct contact and moisture is present, aluminum also expands and contracts 2 to 3 times that of copper with changes in temperature. The Alumniconn connectors are my preferred weapon of choice when it comes to repairs because it keeps the two different wires from physical contact while coating them with antioxidant, eliminating the undesirable properties of aluminum wiring.
I've came across once so far. I was helping my stepfather replace the aluminum wiring in his ranch home built 1973, with copper NM when I was a teenager, that would have been about 17 years ago. several receptacles had burned out, but that wasn't the only problem. In the hallway there was a light and three way switches on either end. Power was fed into the light, and a 12/2 AL cable was dropped from the light to each switch. They were using the bare ground on the commons, and the black and white as travellers, in metal boxes and no electrical tape whatsoever on the bare commons. Hardwood floors so you wouldn't complete a circuit through your body when you touched the live switche plate 😬 Main breaker panel was a 60 amp Zinsco brand in a bedroom clothes closet and a couple of breakers had welded themselves to the bus bar. We both look back all those years ago and said, "unbelievable this house never caught fire, we would have been buying a bunch of lottery tickets had we realized how lucky we were at the time "
Great work and getting things working again. I personally would not have a problem buying a house with aluminum wiring if the price was right, even with a thorough home inspection, being a journeyman myself I would go through every device and every junction to make certain the proper terminations were made, and correct any deficiencies. Because single strand aluminum wiring was only used for a brief period between about 1965 to 1973 give or take a few years due to the severe copper shortages combined with the post war housing boom causing copper to be very expensive if not impossible to obtain, it's very common and unfortunate to see copper and aluminum spliced together with standard wire nuts, and for those unaware, copper and aluminum are dissimilar metals and can undergo galvanic corrosion when in direct contact and moisture is present, aluminum also expands and contracts 2 to 3 times that of copper with changes in temperature. The Alumniconn connectors are my preferred weapon of choice when it comes to repairs because it keeps the two different wires from physical contact while coating them with antioxidant, eliminating the undesirable properties of aluminum wiring.
Well said and thanks for your input! I think aluminum's amount of expansion is probably the most damaging thing.
Do you come across it often?
I've came across once so far. I was helping my stepfather replace the aluminum wiring in his ranch home built 1973, with copper NM when I was a teenager, that would have been about 17 years ago. several receptacles had burned out, but that wasn't the only problem. In the hallway there was a light and three way switches on either end. Power was fed into the light, and a 12/2 AL cable was dropped from the light to each switch. They were using the bare ground on the commons, and the black and white as travellers, in metal boxes and no electrical tape whatsoever on the bare commons. Hardwood floors so you wouldn't complete a circuit through your body when you touched the live switche plate 😬 Main breaker panel was a 60 amp Zinsco brand in a bedroom clothes closet and a couple of breakers had welded themselves to the bus bar. We both look back all those years ago and said, "unbelievable this house never caught fire, we would have been buying a bunch of lottery tickets had we realized how lucky we were at the time "