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My brother added a breaker and ran a line of wire, but he stripped off the plastic sheath leaving bare copper wire in the attic. Is this safe?

Bev Sweet
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    A topic for Home Improvement. They'll want pictures. – Chris Knudsen Jan 11 '23 at 13:44
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    What is this wire connected to? Most likely it's not safe. – floppydisk Jan 11 '23 at 13:46
  • This is very vague and ambiguous. Try editing it to add more details. – cats are the best Jan 11 '23 at 14:07
  • Depends on which wire it was. In some jurisdictions it is forbidden to make electrical installations without understanding how to do it or without being a properly trained electrician. For safety reasons. If the house burns down from that installation, the insurance company might be interested who made the installation. – Justme Jan 11 '23 at 15:20

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I can't speak for the specific building code where you live, but in general terms, only ground wires can safely be bare. If it's a ground wire, then great! Unless your building code says ground wires need insulation outside of junction boxes, to protect them from corrosion. Which it might.

If it's live or neutral, it needs insulation, no matter what. Otherwise you can be electrocuted by touching it, or it can touch another piece of metal and make sparks that can catch your attic insulation on fire and burn your house down.

Even neutral wires need insulation, because neutral becomes live if it accidentally gets disconnected. Ground doesn't, which is why many building codes allow it to be bare copper.

I understood that the entire wire is missing insulation, but if it's just a small nick, it might be safe to repair by wrapping it in insulating material, such as electrical tape - but I expect that the building code probably wants you to run a whole new wire. New wire is cheap, burned houses are expensive - best to be safe.

user253751
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    Re, "wrapping it in insulating material." The plastic sheath on the wires in our walls is _certified_ not just for its insulating properties, but also for its fire-retardant properties when over-heated. Wrapping in some arbitrary insulating material will not satisfy the building codes. If a building inspector ever finds it, they're not going to care whether or not the insulation actually _works._ They're not going to care whether or not it actually _is_ fireproof. They're only going to want to see that it bears the correct labelling. – Solomon Slow Jan 11 '23 at 15:22
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    I'm not familiar with building codes, but wouldn't an uninsulated ground wire *running through attic space* be susceptible to corrosion? I could get it if it was somewhat protected inside conduit or something, but exposed in the attic sounds like a recipe for broken ground connections a few decades down the line. – Hearth Jan 11 '23 at 16:21
  • @Hearth You might be right. This isn't the right site for building code advice. – user253751 Jan 11 '23 at 16:23
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Is this safe?

No. And I would be superbly surprised if the answer was anything else, unless you're asking about a very short length of wire poking just around the edge of a junction box or something like that. I doubt that's the case.

I don't quite see how you can run just one wire anyway: seems like a big hack if that's actually so. A new circuit would need three wires at least: neutral, live, and ground. These can be separate wires if they run in a conduit, but in most house wiring they would be a part of a cable with an external jacket surrounding the individually insulated live and neutral wires. The ground wire inside of a cable is usually left uninsulated, and metal conduits can be used for grounding when listed for such use.

Your situation sounds super fishy to me - especially if you need to ask, assume the answer is: All that wiring has to be redone. Hire an electrician. It's less hassle than dealing with malfunctioning circuits or electrical fires.

Kuba hasn't forgotten Monica
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