Replacing worn out electrical receptacles?

[Whoaru99]

There are some receptacles in my house that need replacing. The grip on the inserted plug is not very tight. I will be using the "commercial grade" receptacles, not the open box $0.89 bottom shelf ones.

The circuits have grounding wires in them but the grounding wire only connects to the metal box. The receptacle yoke connects to the metal box via the mounting screws, grounding the receptacles that way.

Seems like it would be a good ideal to pigtail off a separate grounding wire and run it to the grounding screw on the receptacle itself (plus keeping the original grounding wire to the metal box). But, I have a couple questions -

1. Is it required to add a receptacle grounding wire, per code, when replacing receptacles in old work/existing circuits?

2. If done, does one open up another can of worms because now the existing circuit has been modified so I have to bring the whole circuit up to current code...AFCIs (or whatever)?

[SkunkedAgain]

Code varies from city-to-city so you need to check with your local electrical inspector to see what rules they follow. Usually it's the state electrical code with some minor variances. I say all this as a DIY guy, so take it all with a grain of salt.

If the boxes are already grounded then you don't need to pigtail, as it's just doubling the protection. When I renovated my basement and pulled a lot of new circuits in my house, I mostly used armored (BX) wire which was grounded from the panel, through the armor, to the outlet boxes. If you are using non-metalic (NM) Romex with metal boxes, you can still just take the grounding wire to a grounding screw in the box. Obviously with plastic boxes you need to ground the receptacle directly or pigtail if the circuit continues to another outlet.

In my city (Richfield), the inspector said that any circuit I touched needed to be upgraded which meant new arc-fault breakers in the panel. You'll need to find out what your inspector wants to see.

[Whoaru99]

Yeah, the latter situation is what I was afraid of if one starts changing/modifying the actual wiring. I think I'll just replace the loose-gripping receptacles and reconnect things as they are.