![]() If you can find a stud to nail the box to (from its inside you can drill holes in metal boxes if the holes aren't on a knockout). If you use a metal box, you'll have no trouble finding a cable clamp appropriate for #8 SEU, and the metal box will also carry ground to the outlet and you can terminate the retrofit ground wire at the metal box with no need to bring it to the outlet. You can then use a dryer outlet which mounts in the box. Then you will have enough sheath length to enter the box properly. Since the wall seems to be open behind, I would carefully open that up and make a hole right-sized for a junction box embedded in the wall. That's not allowed.The sheath must enter the cable clamp on the receptacle. However, that one is too short and the cable sheath is already stripped before it comes through the wall. Normally, a cable coming through the wall into one of those surface-mount boxes would be fine. So yes, you do need to torque these terminals to spec, but you needed to do that anyway. But of course when a copper wire fails due to lack of torque, nobody goes "See? Proof that copper is unsafe". ![]() We can only guess that applied to aluminum in equal measure. In NEC 2014 they legislated use of torque drivers on any terminal which specifies a torque. They worked the science and found that screw torques have a huge impact. ![]() Long after attention turned away from aluminum, wire connection burn-ups kept happening with copper wire. Now if it feels like there ought to be something else here, there is. Make sure you are choosing a dryer socket which is "AL-CU" rated for both copper and aluminum wire. The bare SEU neutral needs to be insulated from the ground. The ground must be 10 AWG or larger, can be bare, and can go to anywhere with a 10 AWG or larger ground back to the panel - water heater, A/C, any box with non-flexible metal conduit back to the panel, or even the bare copper Grounding Electrode Line going out to the ground rods. It does not need to follow the route of the hots and neutral. You can't retrofit a neutral, but you can retrofit a ground. The other is to retrofit an actual ground wire. This solution does not require running a ground wire. One is to replace the circuit breaker with a 2-pole GFCI breaker, don't actually run a ground wire, and then label the 4-wire socket "GFCI Protected / No Equipment Ground". So let's work the problems one at a time. Further, it appears to be aluminum which is fine however you need to use sockets which are certified for aluminum wire. Should I link the ground and neutral inside this outlet?įrom the knotty appearance of the neutral wire in your wall, it appears this is SEU cable with a bare neutral. Should I put the ground-neutral link back on the dryer and use the 4-wire cord into this 4-wire outlet? You only have one, and so far, you've chosen "safety" over "function" - which honestly, is a good call. You haven't connected anything to the neutral wire, is why your dryer isn't working.
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