Tom
My original recommendation to the OP was to cap the incoming wires and leave them in the metal box that is part of the dishwasher. This saves the OP from having to remove the dishwasher from the opening.
As far as where the receptacle for the dishwasher is to be located, I recently had an inspector fail me because I had the receptacle a few inches off the floor (mounted horizontally) behind the dishwasher. He told me that, by code, it must be inside an adjacent cabinet. I wish I would have had the code you cited to challenge him. Now I do!!!
Thanks.
I have been told;
BUT I HAVE NOT CONFIRMED; that Virginia has an appeals process which can disqualify an inspector who makes too many erroneous rulings. Whether or not that is true the idea has great appeal to me. Some way to hold inspectors accountable for a lack of professional competency is badly needed everywhere. Look at the Mutual Insurance Industry for one example. Those companies have consensus standards on the qualifications of their field inspection staff. Why do they bother? Because the property insurance industry is very competitive and no insurer can afford to turn down a prospective insured based on the bogus report of an incompetent inspector.
Most government run inspection agencies have no such incentive to avoid erroneous rulings. That leads to a continuous stream of erroneous faults found during inspections. Let me give you some examples of the kind of erroneous correction orders and inspector misconduct I have observed during over 50 years in the electrical craft.
An inspector placed their foot on a box mounted on a stud and grabbed the BX cable with both hands and pulled on it to check the security of the clamp. I declined inspection at that point and said I would except a not ready for inspection fee rather than have the inspection continue. The inspector immediately became hostile and said it would just be more strict the next time thus openly engaging in intimidation. I went to the chief inspector's office truly dreading the meeting. The only way I could imagine passing an inspection which included such practices would be to build a "strong back"; which is a piece of 2X4 sandwiched between a piece of metal wall channel and a piece of 2X4 metal stud; for every single box and two hole strapping the cable very close to the box. All of the Laboratory Listed Erico Caddy cable stand offs would have had to go in the trash. I was seriously considering abandoning the job even though that would prevent me from getting a performance bond; that you'll never get a commercial job without; for many months. I was thinking how lucky I was that my staff was Union and would be back to work with a different employer within the same week.
Lucky for me the city's chief inspector could honestly say "I wrote the code." He was the chairman of the National Electrical Code Coordinating Committee. For those who don't know that is the committee which makes all of the subject committees that write the individual code sections "play nice" with each other. He truly knew the US National Electric Code inside out and backwards. Because he was so thoroughly competent he had the self confidence to listen to someone question the performance of his staff without feeling threatened. He heard me out and signed off my job site unseen. He handed me the Green Sticker for the As Built Drawings I had with me and said "I'll take care of it." When I next encountered that field inspector they were all sweetness and light. Having that man as the chief inspector was pure luck though. That field inspector could have cost me serious money. The job was too small to be worth suing over; which would only be worth it if the job would break even after the legal costs; and too large to be written off as "just the breaks." My family would have suffered financially and perhaps I would have had to go back on the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers local's dispatch book and abandon trying to be a contractor.
Incident 2. The chief inspector of another jurisdiction came out because his inspector had raised questions about the Service Lateral to a hotel fire pump. I was just an electrician on this job so I could stand back and watch the thing work out. It was a 3 phase pump and 3 conductors had been pulled through schedule 80 nonmetallic conduit from the utility's wye connected transformer. As one might expect the Fire Pump Controller was listed as Service Equipment. My foreman was hoping to get a high priced extra out of it by the chief inspector ordering a separate Service Disconnecting Means ahead of the controller. I knew that the General Contractor's Electrical Engineer was about to put us on the dinner menu, chew us up, and spit us out. The Chief Inspector did not recognize the fault and ordered that the service to the fire pump be separately signed off by the electrical engineer.
I got the foreman aside and explained that the only thing that was actually wrong was that he hadn't had the pulling team put a neutral in the Service Lateral conduit pull. As some of you already know a lateral from a wye connected transformer must have a neutral that is brought to the Service Disconnecting Means, connected to any Equipment Grounding Conductors, and bonded to the enclosure of the service equipment. Without that there is no low impedance pathway to clear a fault. The outside superintendent took pictures and went to the electrical engineer. The electrical engineer took one look at the first picture and said; according to the foreman's account as I was not there; "Were is the neutral from the transformer?"
Incident 3. At another hotel the inspector urged the foreman to use plastic boxes in the fire alarm system to avoid ground faults, which caused nuisance calls for the fire department, and to have the greater amount of room the plastic boxes provided in most nominal trade sizes. He was admittedly trying to address a problem that he had encountered before but the entire fire alarm system was required to be run in Electrical Metallic Tubing (EMT) and the plastic boxes which were then ordered were the plain vanilla ones and not the ones with the interior bonding strap between the knock outs. The entire hotel was done with the fire alarm conduit electrically discontinuous at every single box. I sure hope there isn't a lot of rusting on the metal studs that the conduit and greenfield was run through because those are the only things connecting those conduits to each other electrically. Low voltage fire alarm wires have to enter medium voltage; 480/277 volt; equipment all the time to connect with duct detectors, air compressors... If a 277 volt ground fault ever does occur some of that conduit will become energized and only be grounded to the neutral and thus back to the utility transformer by a high impedance pathway. So when a fire ignites and someone goes to pull an manual alarm station it could be energized at 277 volts to ground.
Incident 4 A little girl who was killed when the outdoor railing she touched was energized at 277 volts. The railing had internal lighting which shown out of the bottom of the rail to illuminate the steps below. One of the fire fighters who responded to the call told me later that the visual effect was quite attractive. That free standing aluminum railing, which is set on concrete steps using electrically isolating mounts to avoid corrosion of aluminum in contact with concrete, had not been bonded back to the box that lighting supply had been taken from. When the fault occurred there was no fault clearing path at all. Someone inspected that installation and missed the complete absence of an equipment grounding or bonding conductor. I know that there are a lot of things to look at on a large job but failing to keep an eye out for the grounding of conductive surfaces intended for constant direct contact use by people is gross incompetence.
MY point is that inspectors are human. They make mistakes. The costs of those mistakes are often simply absorbed by the electrical contractor and passed on to the public. In other cases their mistakes can cause reel danger that will only be found by a tragedy. The entire industry and the government operated inspection services need a simple and no retaliation method to appeal erroneous corrective orders. There needs to be a nationwide requirement that all violations be written with "chapter and verse" reference to the electrical code that is being enforced. There is a need for some automatic tracking of inspector competence that forces the ones that fall short back into training or out of the inspectors position. No I am not holding my breath while I wait.
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Tom Horne
