Why pigtail inside a receptacle?

[RBM]

Good point. The typical scenario I'm referring to goes like this: 1980's house roughing. You have two bedrooms back to back about 60 feet from the panel. You want to run separate 15 amp circuits to each. You can drag two

14/2 cables, one per room, or drag one 14/3. If you bring the multiwire, you'd bring it into an outlet box on a common wall to both rooms and split one circuit for each room at that point. In the box where you brought the two circuit cable, you have an outlet. That outlet and only that outlet cannot have the neutrals dependent upon the receptacle, and must be pigtailed. Once you've exited that box, each circuit are just two wire single circuits, and all neutrals can be dependent upon the receptacles

[zxcvbob]

The backwire holes on good receptacles are screw clamps. I like them better than the side screw terminals.

Bob

[gfretwell]

Usually this split will happen in a ceiling box and it ends up being a regular circuit beyond that. You usually will not have the space in a regular device box for that many wires.

[RBM]

I've always used deep bang on 1900 boxes with reducing covers

[Mike Ruskai]

On or about Sat, 12 May 2007 15:12:47 -0500 did zxcvbob dribble thusly:

Not to mention possibly dangerous. I once had to wire a 240V outlet for an electric range with 6-gauge wire. That outlet box sure looked big before I tried to shove four of those monstrous wires into it.

As it turns out, a sharp edge in the box punctured one of the wires, and upon turning on the circuit, I had a very dark house. It didn't trip the 40A double breakers it was attached to, or even the box breaker. It tripped the outside breaker where the power comes in from the pole.

All because of a tiny cut in the insulation that was nearly impossible to find.

I'll take the spaghetti of half a dozen 15A runs meeting inside a switch box over that.

[Mike Ruskai]

On or about Sat, 12 May 2007 21:01:45 GMT did "Toller" dribble thusly:

Yeah, at least with the latter, you know the screws had to be accessible before shoving the outlet into the box.

With the former, you can contrive to insert the wires and shove the outlet in the box with the same motion. Which is a way to leave a future homeowner with a reversed polarity outlet that has only enough slack to move it far enough to discount the theory that it's glued in.