Need Help With DIY Electrical Stuff

frau kaleun · 11-09-14, 11:12 PM

Okay, I mentioned in my other thread from tonight that I might ask with help for a problem I'm having with a project, so here goes:

I've been needing to add an electrical outlet to my mudroom, cuz there ain't one and the power strip and extension cord just doesn't cut it. Fortunately there is an outlet on the other side of a shared wall, so after reading up on how to do it and making sure I felt I knew what I was doing, I decided to go ahead with it.

Then I got clever and decided that instead of adding a standard outlet and then plugging a power strip into it and mounting that on the wall, I'd get one of those power strips that you hardwire into the power feed instead.

So after getting all the stuff I needed I got the Romex wired in to the existing outlet and run through to supply the power strip, got the power strip base mounted to the wall, wire it all up, and... I get no juice to anything I plug into the outlets on the strip. My tester doohickey tells me they're hot, so the power feed is there, the connections are hot, but none of the outlets provide any actual power to anything I plug in.

The installation instructions for this thing are useless, basically they tell you how to mount the base for the wall and snap the power strip front onto it, but when it comes to the wiring they just say - in so many words - "wire this up according to the rules for how to wire stuff up" and that's it. Well, there's three wires in this thing that match what would go to a normal outlet - hot/black, neutral/white, and ground/green (unless they screwed around with the colors for some reason, and why would they do that?) - so that's how I connected them to the power feed. There was a green (I assume) grounding screw inside the thing so I pigtailed a ground wire to that, but with or without that doesn't matter, no power to the outlets.

Is there some special trick to wiring these things that I'm missing? Is there something I need to do to the wires where they go in and out of the individual outlets that I don't know about? I popped the removable back off them and the wires aren't stripped in there but I'm assuming that the sharp metal of the back of each plug thing that they're pushed down into cuts through the insulation and makes the individual connections. I made sure they are all pushed down as far as they will go and the things they are passing through are as tight around them as they will get, I don't know what else to do! Maybe this thing is just a piece of crap, or else there's something else to wiring these things about which I am completely clueless and I've googled for hours and found NOTHING that provides a hint about it. (The manufacturer's website is equally useless in this respect).

Any way I'm about ready to just put a standard outlet in there and buy the corded version and hook that up, I guess if a standard outlet doesn't work either I'll know it's something to do with the power feed but that's definitely hot and everything else on the same circuit is fine, so I'm stumped.

11-09-14, 11:12 PM	#1
frau kaleun Rear Admiral Join Date: Nov 2009 Location: Skyri--oh who are we kidding, I'm probably at Lowe's. Again. Posts: 12,706 Downloads: 168 Uploads: 0	Need Help With DIY Electrical Stuff Okay, I mentioned in my other thread from tonight that I might ask with help for a problem I'm having with a project, so here goes: I've been needing to add an electrical outlet to my mudroom, cuz there ain't one and the power strip and extension cord just doesn't cut it. Fortunately there is an outlet on the other side of a shared wall, so after reading up on how to do it and making sure I felt I knew what I was doing, I decided to go ahead with it. Then I got clever and decided that instead of adding a standard outlet and then plugging a power strip into it and mounting that on the wall, I'd get one of those power strips that you hardwire into the power feed instead. So after getting all the stuff I needed I got the Romex wired in to the existing outlet and run through to supply the power strip, got the power strip base mounted to the wall, wire it all up, and... I get no juice to anything I plug into the outlets on the strip. My tester doohickey tells me they're hot, so the power feed is there, the connections are hot, but none of the outlets provide any actual power to anything I plug in. The installation instructions for this thing are useless, basically they tell you how to mount the base for the wall and snap the power strip front onto it, but when it comes to the wiring they just say - in so many words - "wire this up according to the rules for how to wire stuff up" and that's it. Well, there's three wires in this thing that match what would go to a normal outlet - hot/black, neutral/white, and ground/green (unless they screwed around with the colors for some reason, and why would they do that?) - so that's how I connected them to the power feed. There was a green (I assume) grounding screw inside the thing so I pigtailed a ground wire to that, but with or without that doesn't matter, no power to the outlets. Is there some special trick to wiring these things that I'm missing? Is there something I need to do to the wires where they go in and out of the individual outlets that I don't know about? I popped the removable back off them and the wires aren't stripped in there but I'm assuming that the sharp metal of the back of each plug thing that they're pushed down into cuts through the insulation and makes the individual connections. I made sure they are all pushed down as far as they will go and the things they are passing through are as tight around them as they will get, I don't know what else to do! Maybe this thing is just a piece of crap, or else there's something else to wiring these things about which I am completely clueless and I've googled for hours and found NOTHING that provides a hint about it. (The manufacturer's website is equally useless in this respect). Any way I'm about ready to just put a standard outlet in there and buy the corded version and hook that up, I guess if a standard outlet doesn't work either I'll know it's something to do with the power feed but that's definitely hot and everything else on the same circuit is fine, so I'm stumped.