Does Harbor Freight ever get any cheaper?

clinehall · **Posted:** Tue Jan 03, 2017 7:53 am

RickyBeam wrote:

clinehall wrote:

...Straight wired to the breaker. Can I ...

You CAN, but there's a reason it's hardwired. Building. Code. A water heater can pull enough current to melt a remotely marginal plug.

Yeah, not my best idea. Thanks to everyone that kept me from burning down my house. Of course I could have then rebuilt trading the living and dinning room area for more garage space.

Richard Casto · **Posted:** Tue Jan 03, 2017 10:02 am

clinehall wrote:

Of course I could have then rebuilt trading the living and dinning room area for more garage space.

https://youtu.be/uaBQ4IR79dw?t=20s

Richard

JamesMilko · **Posted:** Sat Jan 07, 2017 2:04 pm

RickyBeam wrote:

clinehall wrote:

...Straight wired to the breaker. Can I ...

You CAN, but there's a reason it's hardwired. Building. Code. A water heater can pull enough current to melt a remotely marginal plug.

As long as the heater only pulls 80% of what the plug is rated for you're fine. I'd be worried about forgetting to plug the hot water heater back in though. No hot water will lead to some unhappy domestic situations. If your water heater is inside the house it's likely plugged since NEMA requires a disconnect to be within sight. The breaker counts if you can see the breaker box from the hot water heater.

If the box is mounted properly with an appropriate plug I don't see why this would be a code violation. Unless there is some esoteric part of the code that requires hot water heaters to be hard wired (with disconnects if they are inside). But, like Vincent said it's easy to run another branch if you have space in your panel.

clinehall · **Posted:** Sun Jan 08, 2017 7:44 am

JamesMilko wrote:

RickyBeam wrote:

clinehall wrote:

...Straight wired to the breaker. Can I ...

You CAN, but there's a reason it's hardwired. Building. Code. A water heater can pull enough current to melt a remotely marginal plug.

As long as the heater only pulls 80% of what the plug is rated for you're fine. I'd be worried about forgetting to plug the hot water heater back in though. No hot water will lead to some unhappy domestic situations. If your water heater is inside the house it's likely plugged since NEMA requires a disconnect to be within sight. The breaker counts if you can see the breaker box from the hot water heater.

If the box is mounted properly with an appropriate plug I don't see why this would be a code violation. Unless there is some esoteric part of the code that requires hot water heaters to be hard wired (with disconnects if they are inside). But, like Vincent said it's easy to run another branch if you have space in your panel.

I got under the house to see how hard it would be to run a line and found a gray water pipe leak so my priority changed. Now with the snowpocalypse I'm tiling this weekend. Perhaps I will get to this next week.

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Does Harbor Freight ever get any cheaper?

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