[Topspinmo]

Originally Posted by Blueblaze

Former licensed electrician here.

There is no problem using "15A" receps on a 20A circuit, unless the circuit is dedicated to a device that requires it, like the charging port for your golf cart in your garage. The "rating" refers to the prongs, not the electrical capacity of the outlet. 20a receps are intended for a dedicated 20A single-outlet circuit, and have a "T"-shaped ground prong, although ordinary 15A plugs will also plug into it.

On the issue of a breaker intermittently popping, all of the solutions mentioned are typical. But I discovered one very atypical problem in my Courtyard Villa rental, shortly after I bought it, several years ago. The 3-way circuit in the dining room would occasionally pop the breaker. None of the usual solutions fixed it, so I began to suspect that the wire was damaged somehow. It ran through a narrow area in the attic that I couldn't get to, so I just pulled on it. There was a brief flash and the breaker popped. I disconnected the wire in the attic and then removed the box from the wall, so I could reach up with my pliers and remove the staples, to pull the wire out of the wall.

A couple of inches above the staple crease there was a black spot, and in the middle of that was staple. Not a staple like you use to install wiring. It was the thin wire staple they use at the factory to secure the end of a new roll of romex to the side of the wooden spool. You're supposed to cut it off when you start a new roll. But the idiot who wired that house didn't bother to do that, and instead had used a wire with a staple sticking out of it. It miraculously sorta worked, because the staple wasn't making contact all the time, at least until I jerked on it.

This house had gone 15 years with a wire that occasionally sparked when the heat and humidity expanded the wire enough to make contact with that staple, and nobody in that 15 years had bothered to fix it. Between the idiot electrician and the prior owner who wasn't worried about his house burning down, it was a level of stupidity impossible to comprehend. What's frightening to me is the number of houses in The Villages that electrician must have wired.

Agree, I’m not electrician just what I know from troubleshooting on dinosaur aircraft engines. I know just enough to not get myself in trouble. I too was surprised amount of errors made when house was built. Like nobody licensed looking over the apprentice. I think I finely got to top of my mole hill, but time will tell.