I am in the process of opening up a wall (interior and bearing) in order to provide easier access to another room. I found more electrical wiring than I bargained for. I am rerunning some of the wiring, but I have two lines that would require much more effort to rerun than I would like to spend. These are simple bedroom circuits in a newer house that has been relatively unfooled-around-with since construction about 7 of years ago. Is there a way to splice wiring that can be left “in-wall” that is safe and up-to-code (I realize this is location dependant, I am more concerned about safety than code compliance). I would like to avoid using through the wall, blanked, wiring boxes if possible. Any ideas? I am envisioning some slick mechanical fastener, shrink tubing, maybe some solder…I don’t know. Thanks
Dan in Connecticut
Replies
None that I know of.
What you can do is to go back to a box that is going to stay (or a new box) and replace it with an bigger box and so the splicing in that one.
Or go back to the basement/crawlspace/attic.
Thanks for your input. Dan
Unfortunately, no...to meet Code and safety concerns, any splices must be done in a junction box that will be accessible after the wall is closed back up. Either put a box in the wall and use a blank cover (when painted it shouldn't be very noticable) or re-do the wiring back to some existing box.
The second option can be tricky, since you don't want to end up overloading that existing box with too many splices; there are too many variables in calculating how many splices are allowed in a box of a particular size to say much more about it here, without knowing how many wires are in the box, the wire sizes, how many splices, how big the box is, etc.
I figured that a wall box was the only way to do the job. These will be newly-installed boxes, maybe two splices in each (14 gauge wiring). Do you know if there is a problem with spliced wires from different circuits occupying the same utility box? Dan
Just get a big (expensive) framed picture to cover the junction box - no one will ever know... Maybe you could make the cover of the j-box look like a wall safe to give the burglers a charge...
No, there shouldn't be any problem with two different circuit splices in the same box, as long as you have enough room for all the wirenuts.
Why not extend them by adding more outlets. Hopefully there is enough wire to move to the side of the opening and run new wire from it to another on the other side. If having to do more that one circuit use the deeper boxes legal for that much wire fill.