Yeah, a broken neutral can be one of the most perplexing problems to troubleshoot. There's always the tendency to suspect 'no hot' whenever there's no voltage between two points that should show a voltage.

It's normal to assume that the connections were properly made and are still as installed. When I have to test several wires for both hot and neutral (and ground), I use a three-conductor extension cord plugged into a known-properly-wired receptacle as references.

I once had a most unusual call: the switches and lights in a bathroom were shocking people. What should have been ground was indeed hot to ground. I found that an older (i.e., non-wire-nutted) ground junction in a two-gang switchbox was the culptit.

When the cables were installed, the electrician apparently nicked a ground wire while stripping the cable, and it happened to be the feed into the box. The ground wire broke at the sheath, slowly spiraled its way along the twists, and touched a hot screw terminal.

Everything downstream that was supposed to be grounded became hot!

As for the boxes, the larger ones cost more. Most electricians aren't the owner of the company, don't consider future changes, and definitely aren't the end user, so they only use what is required. Boxes have fill limits:

Each conductor entering a box count as one, all the grounds count as one, a device counts as two, etc. The limit is different for each wire size. 14 ga. requires 2 cu. in. per wire, 12 ga. requires 2.25 cu. in. per wire. Notice the two for a device doesn't ask how big the device is.

Larry
www.fineelectricco.com

This message was edited by Larry Fine on 06/11/03 01:08.