Hey all, recently I have been trying to replace outlets in my house (it is very old) and today I came upon a two-pronged outlet that has two hot wires on the bottom screw and one on the top, as well as two neutral wires on the bottom screw and one on the top. I am trying to fit a GFCI into this junction box and it cannot fit with all of the wires still in the box. Why would anyone need three hot and three neutral wires and how can I reduce the space required for them?
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(Presumably) it is a JUNCTION box. That is, several cables are joined. Most likely you have one pair of wires coming into the box from upstream, and then the box produces a Y, feeding two separate downstream circuits. This is not at all unusual, though modern electricians will often spend a little extra wire to try to avoid it, since, as you have found, having that many wires in the box gets messy.
A common way to reduce the mess is to use a compact wire joiner (an improvement over "wire nuts") to combine the three wires into one (after shortening the wires in the box as much as possible). Or you can combine the two downstream wires and attach them to the "load" side of the GFCI, to give the downstream circuits "protection".