Wiring two outlets together

You misused the term "pigtail" but your wiring sounds correct.

None of the 4 outlets work, not even the one the feed goes to directly? Then you have a defective outlet. If the first outlet is okay, but none of the others have power, then you probably have the tabs between the top and bottom broken off.

Well, apparently you did do something wrong. Exactly what is hard to say from here.

I would suggest that you might want to purchase two items that are useful. You can get a very cheap little Volt-Ohm meter that is sufficient to test continuity and relative voltages, probably in almost any auto parts, electrical supply, hardware or even in a grocery store. If you are ever likely to want accurage measurements though, go spend $50-100 on a good digital VOM.

The other test item worth having probably cost a little more than the cheap voltmeter, but is high quality and still inexpensive and it is *well* *worth* having. That's a polarity/ground checker, or whatever they call those little plugin units with three lights on them that tell you whether a standard socket is correctly wired.

All together they aren't going to cost you $20 probably. But both are extremely useful. In particular the last item can be used to check every outlet in your house on a regular basis (once a year or so).

As a side note, I just wired up two sets of outlets. Each consists of 5 ea dual sockets placed as close together as would fit with front plates on. I took roughly 2 foot lengths of (12 ga) wire and stripped off about 3/4" of insulation at the right intervals to allow one wire to run from the first socket to the last one. That way the connection to socket number three, for example, is not carrying current for socket number five. Only the first socket actually has two separate connections. That could have been done with a pigtail, but that's more of a mess than two connections to the socket. (And I used an electric screwdriver to tighten up screw connections, so I'm not really concerned about how much current goes through the two connections.)

Okay I have this tester that will tell me whats wrong with the circut. So I plugged it in and it tells me that I have an open neutral. I've taken off the second socket and I still get the same thing. I go down to the basement where the main feed to the first socket comes out of a junction box, and disconnect all other wires except the main coming from the circut breaker and the main feeding the socket in the room where I'm having problems. I still get an error of an open neutral. I've next to take off the front of the breaker enclosure and see if the circut breaker is wired correct. Or replace the socket with a different one and see if I still have problems.

The strange thing is that this main from the circut panel to the junction box is orginal wire when the house was built so I'm not sure when or where the problem could have occured.

One other bit of info.....all the house is wired in aluminum. I am using the AU wire nuts that have the oxide stuff in the tip so that I don;t burn down the house. just not sure what's going on with this circut.

Thanks Tom

Check that the brass strip between the top and bottom screws on each outlet is still in place. If the outlets have been used before in, say, a kitchen where the top and bottom receptacles are required to be on different breakers, the brass strip may have been removed.