Test by shorting out wires by pushing with insulated screwdriver or pliers.
Test by shorting out wires by pushing with insulated gloves.
Wire in light.
Turn house power back on again, check light.
I’m bad enough at wiring in without touching the wire that I like to short everything out first. I’ve seen enough cases where ‘turning off the switch’ or ‘removing the fuse’ didn’t work that I’d rather power down the whole house. And poking the blades of an appliance plug into a box is, in my opinion, just dumb (sorry). I wouldn’t do that.
Normally what happens is a sharp BANG, some smoke and (typically) a tiny spec of exploding flying metal (wear safety glasses, the boiling metal is what causes the bang). The thought of doing that on a ladder horrifies me. The thought of doing that at ground level only frightens me a little bit. But I have, over the years, burned out some short unfused wiring runs, and I’m not entirely blase about the possibility of burning down a house while working on old wiring.
Happened to my neighbour doing a bathroom reno…chipping tiles off a wall…hit an old wire…dead in under 20 seconds.
Insurance for house, personal liability and Life didn’t cover it as he was working around live wires without an electrician.
I accidently knocked the wire nut off a neutral circuit which fried several electronic units like my VCR / DVD / Soundbar along with the control board for my fireplace. These were on 2 different circuits and I don’t recall them having a common neutral. I had just taken the cover off the jct box in the basement to see if I could get another circuit pulled through it.
The actual reality of household wiring is / can be more complex than the simple power source → switch → load → neutral return line diagrams one sees in how-to books & online advice sites. Which means that simple working assumptions or ad hoc tests derived from simplified understanding may leave you (or your house) exposed to a lot more risk than you’d bargained for.
Electricians knowingly take known risks. Clueless newbie DIYers often unknowingly take unknown risks. Better informed / equipped / experienced DIYers are somewhere in the middle. As long as they haven’t confused having been lucky (so far) with being safely skilled.
As Dirty Harry once said about a different dangerous activity: “A man has got to know his limitations.”
Yes to both.
As pointed out what if the appliance is not working properly so you think the line is dead and it’s not?
What happens if the appliance is rated for 120V and that line is 240V?
Overall view: if a person is using an appliance to test wiring and not a multimeter I suspect there are other safety issues waiting in the wings.
From experience, an oldish heavier duty drill, like from just after the steel case era, can handle 220volt mistakes for a bit longer than detonating an incandescent bulb. Learned that working on depression era wiring in old sheds and barns. Always tested the power and wiring afterwards with an old “who cares about it” drill before turning on the lights or anything else more expensive like pumps and compressors – just in case.
Those were my DIY electrical knowledge from my dad and neighbors days before I got an electrical apprenticeship and learned how cheap and easy meters are.