Wiring, and the mysterious black tape

I have most of the wiring run, concentrating on the outside walls since it needs to be done before insulation. The laundry room has its own circuit (GFCI-protected), and there is also a light in the furnace room/closet. There are 8 plugs in the rec-room area (since I’ll be using it as my office space, I wanted lots of plugs), on two separate circuits. There is also another separate circuit for all the lights.

I also ran a new plug outside, as I did not have a plug in the back yard, and a new wire to the plug beside my driveway. The driveway plug has been unhooked since shortly after I moved in and found a scary/confusing contraption involving old NM wire, extension cord plugs, and a switch, branched off from another random circuit. I unfortunately didn’t take a picture of this, but I didn’t really want it hooked up (especially not when I had to get an electrical inspection done for insurance). The outside plugs are on their own dedicated circuit.

I have another outside plug on the front of the house which is tied into a circuit shared with a bedroom and some lights. I was going to run a new circuit for it, but the wires were routed in a way that made it impossible to fish a new wire through, and there was no way to legally put in a junction box to use the existing wires. In the end I decided it was not a big deal, so I just left it.

One of the last things I had to remove from the original basement were the plugs for the washer and dryer. Both of them were mounted on a piece of wood, directly on the cement foundation, so of course they had to be moved before the insulation could be sprayed in.

The wires for both of these old circuits were aluminum. I kept the dryer wire, and just ran it to a new insulated box, mounted lower down the wall (luckily there was a few extra feet up in the header area, for some reason). Aluminum is really not too bad to work with. The biggest thing is that all connections need to have an anti-oxidant paste applied to them, and they need to be connected using aluminum-rated parts. In this case I’m just using the old dryer plug, which is CO/ALR-rated. The picture here is me applying the paste before connecting the wires.

Once finished, I pulled the mounting boards off the wall and removed the old wire.

While I was removing the old washing machine wire, I came across a part of it that was covered by black tape, tucked up in the header above the window. I took the tape off, and found a cut with some exposed wiring (it’s just the ground, but even so..). You never know what you’re going to find, and had I never replaced this wire, I probably never would have noticed.