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I was wiring a 4-wire smoke wrong for almost a decade
It finally clicked for me last month on a job in a big old house in Tacoma. I was always just connecting the red and black for power and tying the yellow and white together for the alarm loop, thinking that was the standard. The homeowner asked why his old system had a separate zone for each smoke, and I had to actually look it up. Turns out I was missing the whole point of the extra wires for remote test and reset functions from the panel. How many of you actually use all four wires on a conventional smoke, or did you also just do the basic two-wire hookup for years?
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the_julia5mo ago
Makes you wonder what else we're all doing wrong, huh?
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max_schmidt774mo ago
23 years of wiring my own garage lights and I still catch myself using whatever color Romex I grabbed off the truck. One time I wired a whole outlet run with just the black and white, skipped the ground entirely because I was in a hurry and the box was plastic. Thing worked fine for six years until a new homeowner's inspector caught it and made me rip the whole thing out.
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piper_garcia235mo ago
Read a forum post once where a guy said he only ever used two wires unless the specs called for the full four.
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susan_allen5mo ago
Saw a similar thread where an electrician argued it was fine for short runs under low load. He claimed the voltage drop was negligible in most residential cases. Made a big deal about saving copper and time. Ever run into that on a job site?
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