Standard wiring practice duplex receptacles, both screws used?

Looping a wire around both screws is a dumb idea.

It is not uncommon to connect the wire coming in to one screw and going out to the other screw - plenty of electricians do it. With #12 wire it may be easier to stuff the receptacle into the box with only 2 pigtails connecting to the receptacle. On a 15A receptacle the wire-through plate is rated 20A. (The 2 receptacles in a 15A duplex are rated 20A total.)

If a multi-wire (Edison) circuit goes through the box you can't wire the neutral through the receptacle. (Wire nut or splice the in and out neutral to a pigtail to the receptacle.)

I've never been able to quite get my mind around exactly what a "neutral" wire is or what it does...

It just sits around and doesn't say anything. If questioned, it says, "I don't want to get involved."

When I was young, and I heard that Switzerland was neutral, I thought ttat meant they were fair, honorable, etc. But as time went on, I learned a lot of crap about the country and many of the people.

It's a tap in the center of the output windings on your electric service transformer . Center to either end gives you 110V , end to end gives you 220V . Ideally in a system that has the 110V circuits "balanced" there will be very little actual current flowing on the neutral leg .

The neutral is probably also always connected to the equipment ground system and earthing electrode(s). Color is white or gray.

Definition of a neutral is relatively recent in the NEC. Always used to be the "grounded conductor" which is different from the "grounding conductor" (green/bare wire). Very confusing until you got them straight.

I am not at all surprised by that.

There could possibly be no current on the neutral. One of my neighbors had a tree fall on his power line, breaking the neutral and one hot.

He could still make coffee; half of his circuits worked at least partly. Apparently enough current flowed to ground to make the circuit. (The storm that took the tree down was a big one, so the soil was probably pretty wet.)

A bad neutral can and often does result in damaging voltage conditions - and these can be erratic and unpredictable. Best to just shut 'er down. John T.

According to some, the neutral wire magically turns single phase into two phase.

Want country are you living in where it's 220/110? It's 240/120 in the US.

Many of the older people say 110/220 because that is what it was many years ago. It has also been 115/230, 117/234, 120/240 and now in some parts like at my house it is 125/250. All in the US over the last 100 or so years.

Good thing is that many of the electronic devices are using switching power supplies so the wide range of voltage is not much of a problem.

Friend of mine just had a radio from the 1930's or so repaired by an execellant repair person. When he got home it lasted about 2 hours before the capacitors went up in smoke due to the over voltage.

He now uses a transformer to reduce the voltage back to around 110 volts. I use a transformer to reduce the voltage on some of my ham radio stuff like the setup of a station of around the time I was born from the 125 to 127 volts at my house to 115 volts like it was rated for.

Yeah , us codgers are a bit stuck in the past ... actually , I went out and checked and I've got 120/240 service .

-11.67% for extreme conditions -(106 to 127 volts) Normal conditions voltage 120 +5.83% / -8.33% (110 to 125 volts)

Variacs are a godsend for older tube equipment - I hace several from

"In the United States[12][13] and Canada,[14] national standards specify that the nominal voltage at the source should be 120 V and allow a range of 114 V to 126 V (RMS) (-5% to +5%). Historically, 110 V, 115 V and 117 V have been used at different times and places in North America. Mains power is sometimes spoken of as 110 V; however, 120 V is the nominal voltage."

Thanks, Clare. Sounds like my observations are completely normal and I can stop stabbing receptacles now.

If you have metal water service main and metal water service to house you might not notice an open service neutral. Path is house neutral through the N-G bond at the service to water pipe earthing electrode, but then to street main, to adjacent house water service(s), to adjacent house N-G bond, back out adjacent service neutrals.

Earthing electrode resistance to earth is not real good (particularly ground rods), and above does not use an earth path. A path through earth in not allowed by the NEC as the path to trip a breaker on a ground-fault.

Hard to imagine that capacitors are going to fail over the slight differences in line voltage, certainly not ones that aren;t already failing. If it was an old radio and expertly repaired then I would think they would have been replaced. Capacitors are one of the components most likely to fail due to age.