TOPIC: reversed polarity

Does anyone have a good diagram of reversed polarity?

Reverse Polarity / Reversed Polarity / Hot and Neutral Reversed
(This condition lets the outlet run things, but there can be circumstances in which this would not be entirely safe). If the tester is correct, this means that the right-hand slot of the receptacle (viewing the three holes as a face) is probably connected to wires that are actually neutral, whereas that slot is supposed to be for hot wires. And the left-hand slot is connected to hot wires instead of neutrals.

In this diagram whoever connected outlet "A" put the black on the white's side and vice versa. He also hooked "B" up this same wrong way, but for some reason hooked up "C" right. So "C" reads "correct wiring" and "A" and "B" read "reverse polarity". The solution here is simply to move all blacks and whites at reverse-polarity outlets to their correct side.




But let's consider a complication. There is another (less common) way that reverse polarity tends to come about. It is where someone installing or replacing a receptacle (or even trying to correct the polarity of some) connected the white of a black-white pair to a terminal where another black was (see "A" below) and the black of the pair to the terminal where a white already was:
The effect of this, as shown here, would be a polarity reversal in the color-coding of the wires themselves; then the polarity would read reversed or proper at the receptacle these wires attached to next, depending on whether they were attached there according to color ("B") or according to actual hotness ("C"), respectively. Both "A" and "C" are reading "correct wiring" in spite of the fact that some wires at them are the wrong color. I will not try to advise you on straightening this sort of thing out, except to say that you may want to start from scratch, making sure every receptacle along the circuit has whites on the white side and blacks on the black side and that the blacks, and only the blacks, end up actually hot.

Nice clear diagrams.

Yeah, but don't left handers like it wired reversed?

only in the southern hemisphere.

Here is an illustrated home pic you may like.