While working with my brother on a house he purchased (built in the 60s), we found to our absolute horror that the previous owner had run lamp cord inside the walls to extend outlets, had no grounds and taped the connections (no wire nuts). Needless to say, we ripped out the wiring from the entire house and ran all new (the main runs were okay). Luckily we were able to do that while we stripped the exterior for new insulation and siding.
Electrical tape is good around switches and receptacles to cover terminals to reduce risk of short circuits and/or ground faults when someone opens them up with the power still on. I know we aren't "supposed" to do that but sometimes it happens, or it is necessary for troubleshooting. All the necessary PPE and precautions should be taken, of course. I have used some cool Cooper 20 Amp industrial grade receptacles in my shop and they have little hinged covers that go over the terminals after the wires have been connected.
I am just a DIYer and I wrap the terminals on pretty much every switch or receptacle I install. First main reason is 95% of the boxes in my house are metal. Second is on my first ever project I had a ground bend just right and touch a hot screw down on a switch. I flipped the breaker back on and it immediately kicked back. I also try to be a lot more careful with where things end up in the box now too but with Smart switches, there isn't a lot of room in these old boxes.
For metal and multiple gang boxes it's a must to tape the terminals to avoid shorts and arcing. That's just like my opinion I don't think there is really a code requirement for it but doesn't hurt really so why not.
I'm sure I know the answer from an electrician's standpoint, but curious about your opinion on the new press in and lever wire nuts? Also, when installing a new 10-50r, I used a quad crimper with copper ferrule sleeves as it made stranded wire more like a solid core.
The discussion on data cabling … please do not use those little crimp on connectors for data cabling. Data cables (CAT5/CAT6 for example) must be a continuous run with no splices. And there is a max length of 328 feet from the switch/router to the next active device. If longer is needed then a switch or router must be used. Splicing a data cable means you’ve created a slower network connection. Those crimps you showed could be used for POTS lines but even that can degrade the overall sound quality of calls and, in the old days, your modem wouldn’t connect well unless you paid close attention to your telephone lines splicing quality. I normally retro fitted with home runs to each phone jack then terminated on a high quality 66 block or data block.
@@ElectricProAcademy I had the exact same question, so thank you both :) My old brittle BX / Cotton wrapped wiring I want to manipulate as little as possible so am loving them over wirenuts.
Mexico, tipical house, 1 or 2 circuits for the entire house. 30 amp fuse for 12 or 14 guage wire. Before I replaced everything with proper-sized color-coded wire, The single home run was 12 guage speaker wire. AND there were 3 twist spices before the first junction.
Hooking up Genrack generator - Neighbors house use PVC MC conduit underground from generator to house (buried). Will this pass inspection? Located in Florida
Fascinating and essential discussion on basics….just what I need. I’m building a shop now and will have several 240v circuits for power tools. I will also be putting in a 50 amp pug for an RV pad. What gauge should I use for the 240v circuits? The 50 amp?
Regarding firearms, a 12 gauge bore is the diameter of a 1/12th of a pound sphere of lead, 16 gauge - 1/16th pound, 10 gauge - 1/10th pound, and so on. I don't know if Messrs. Brown & Sharpe derived their system (now known as American Wire Gauge or AWG) from something related or not.
I was taught by an electrician to wrap the hot wires after installing a wire nut. And yes, I have always twisted the wires together prior to installing a wire nut. I only wrap the hot wires, safety first. Grounded metal boxes and all.
Re: 24:35 it is not required to pre-twist conductors with a wire nut. It says that very clearly in the instructions. Additionally there is an argument that wire-nuts work by compressing the wires into each other. By pre-twisting you prevent the wire nut from doing that, and instead are relying only on the pressure you imparted by pre-twisting them, rather than the tapered thread of the wire nut, which can force them together if you let it. I specifically do not pre-twist. Instead I will tighten the wire nut on until the insulated parts of the wire start to twist (just a little).
At the point you started explaining the BUTT CRIMP Splice. I have a fond memory of send my wife & son, to the Supy House for a parts run. Well my wife couldn't remember what exactly I was needing, so son says, oh I know it was those BUTT CRAMP thingys. Have shared many laughs with that one 🤣 Oh and for LAMP CORD while rewiring a 1930's era Dorm Room found a nightmare that simply blew my mind. Someone had installed a 48" attic fan with a 1 hp 240 motor. They took a 14 awg lamp cord tied 1 side to a hot feeding the lights on one side and tied the otherside to the recpicles on the other side and pulled a neutral from another side. There were no wire nut involved with this only the melted remains of about 3 rolls of rubber splicing tape!!! And Yes the motor was burned out!
I only run 12 Guage or bigger. Why cheap out, never know when you might want to plug in a vacuum. My house has half the house on one circuit and half on the other. I ran a dedicated line to the microwave, office and entertainment center. My computer was crashed due to power issues and hasn't sense I moved it to a new dedicated circuit. I think having the office, living room and guarge on one circuit was to much.
You can use Wago connectors to connect 12 gage - 24 gage. I’m a 9 year old kid ,I love doing electrical work that I make paper electrical systems that look real, my name is Caleb ,and I live in PA.
Wow, a 9 year old license electrician!! That's a first!! My point here is that electricity can easily kill you, so it isn't a good idea to take electrical advice from a 9 year old kid!! But it is good that you are learning about electricity. I assume when you say paper electrical system, you are talking about using conductive copper tape. This is OK for low voltage battery operated circuits. But before you start messing with anything lke120 volt household circuits you have a great deal to learn first. Only do this with direct guidance from a professional, not just an adult, because many of them are very stupid when it comes to electricity. Now as for Wagos. some indeed are rated from 12AWG down to 24 awg stranded. but not all, but that is very light gauge wire and not something typically used on a UL approved electrical devices. It is very important that you use only UL approved devices on household electrical systems. You will sometimes find 16 or18 awg stranded wire on approved light fixtures like LED types If the wire is lighter than that, I would avoid it. Cheap Chinese junk sometimes claims to be rated when it isn't. Think about it like this, if you or someone gets killed because what they made was unsafe or defective, what do you think your odds are of suing that Chinese company?? The answer, zero chance. And the Bing Fu company will just change its name to Wang bong. There is a lot of dangerous stuff out there, so you have to be careful and know exactly what you are doing. Stick with the low voltage battery stuff but be aware that lithium batteries can explode when short circuited. Be 100% certain that what you are doing is indeed safe. Keep in mind that even paper circuits can overheat and set the paper on fire. Learn Ohm's laws and know it by heart. volts, amps and ohms can be your friend for making simple circuits, but they can also be your enemy unless you fully understand it. There are things called breadboards which have a bunch of places you can insert small wires, resistors tiny buttons and switches, LEDs capacitors, diodes and transistors as well as some small chips. Supply them from a small battery pack. The components are cheap and you can buy learning kits to build. all sorts of cool things, This is a step up from paper circuits and helps you learn about electronic devices. If you do it wrong, the devices will let out their "magic smoke". Devices like capacitors,, LEDs , and diodes can go off like a fire cracker if you wire them wrong. Resistors can get very hot and burn up. But these are still pretty safe at low power levels. It is a good idea to get in the habit of wearing safety glasses because when one of these devices self destructs, they can spew out tiny bits of molten copper. You don't want that in your eyes. Best to get into this in some kind of school sponsored program with a teacher who knows what they are doing, some schools have good programs and some have things like little robotics classes or clubs, These can be pretty cool. but along with this, make sure you do good in math. The secrets of electricity are in the math and you need to know it well. Ever kind of science comes down to working with math. Electricity is an amazing field to get into. It's what makes the modern world work!! without it we might as well go back to living in caves! I've been an electrical engineer for a very long time and I teach all about electricity. and automation and things like robotic control, My students are HS Juniors and Seniors and I also teach adult classes to people in industry, have been working with electricity all my life. And I still love it. When you learn it, there are many good opportunities and different ways you can go. All these jobs pay pretty well because so few people learn it well. But please stay away from household electrical circuits, they can be deadly. the time will come down the line when you learn it all well enough. Even working with the small low voltage stuff, always have the power source turned off until you are ready to test and are sure that you got it right, Electricity can be a very powerful source, but you can't see it except at super high levels like lightning. As for Wagos, they are approved for use in household wiring, but as an engineer, I advise against using them, they have some flaws like high resistance, being made of dissimilar metals and using the very tiny spring force to maintain a connection. That said, a lot of "electrical installers" like them because they are very easy to use. but as you go through life, you will learn that easier is not always better. Note that in mu opinion, I don't consider most of these "installers" to be real electricians because most don't know the theory well enough and few are actually certified or licensed. You probably wouldn't want a DIY doctor performing surgery on you. Get electricity wrong and people can get killed as easily as if a make believe doctor worked on you! I didn't mean to pick on you, I just wanted to emphasize the importance of really knowing what you are doing with electrical. And be careful because there is a lot of bad information about electricity on the internet. It's not so easy to tell what is good and what isn't until you have mastered all the theory. Have fun and learn, but be careful. Electricity can be very dangerous stuff. It's often when you think you know, that you find out the hard way, that you have more to learn.
A circular mil is a unit of area, equal to the area of a circle with a diameter of one mil (one thousandth of an inch or 0.0254 mm). It isn't a circular millimeter just FYI. A mil is not the same as a millimeter (mm).
I was actually wondering exactly that, as I kept looking at charts saying 0.5067 mm^2 and 5.067×10^−4 mm^2 and not "one square millimeter" or similar. That's so bizarre, and so Imperial-System of us, to make it the equivalent OF something involving an inch, still avoiding anything metric. Ooof.
So you're saying that house that we rented where the guy had remotely located the thermostat control for the baseboard heating using the green Christmas tree extension cords all over the place isn't permanent wiring or temporary wire! Yeah I had a lot of straightening out to do the 50 amp breaker in the panel was feeding the 20 amp general outlet circuits.
A very good video. I sometimes think that some of the rules we have to follow were set forth or lobbied for by electricians. Prime example. (This example is from a friend of mine). There were 3 metal duplex outlet boxes mounted 16 inches apart in a finished basement wall. Let’s say the box on the left is box 1, middle box is box 2, and the one on the right is box 3. The wiring in each box is 14 gauge and the have a ground wire although the ground wire is about a 16 gauge. Probably 60 years old. This guy replaces the bad outlet in box 1. The ground wire in the sheath going from box1 to box 2 is broken and too short in box 1 to either pigtail or terminate under a ground screw. He had to replace the the conductors going from box 1 to box 2 with new 14-2 w/ground to effect that repair. On the same house in the basement a plumber had replaced a section of cold side copper pipe with Pex-A. The electrical inspector made the electrician use some 12 gauge green THNN to jumper a ground from one side of the copper pipe to the other. 😲 Last year to fix my daughter’s bathroom light above the sink and mirror… I removed the old ( maybe 3 year old fixture) and found a metal light switch box that someone nailed onto a board with two finishing nails and put a 1/4 inch thick piece of steel across the front of the box. They drilled holes in the proper places so they could use wood screws to tighten the steel plate to the front of the box. The plate was loose…. They also had bolts coming out of the plate so they could bolt the three light fixture to the loose box. The box wasn’t grounded properly and the ground did not tie into the ground buss at the breaker panel. When I took the old box out of the wall I found 4 feet of THNN 14 gauge wire hanging off a ground screw on the back of the SWITCH box that went to no where. So to fix it properly instead of cheating and just using green THNN I ran a new circuit from the new proper light fixture box rated to hold the weight of the new light fixture back to the breaker panel and terminated everything properly. I also added a GFCI outlet to code in the bathroom. And fixed the light switch in the bathroom that had the wires wrapped the wrong way around the terminals… Needless to say I checked every switch, outlet, light , etc in that house and fixed 14-15 more wiring problems with the house. Then my son bought a house built the same year as my daughter’s house and I went through it with a fine tooth comb and found almost 20 electrical problems and corrected those as well. By the way… some of the old timer electricians back when wire nuts were first used didn’t trust the wire nuts not to come loose would wrap the wire but with electrical tape in a clockwise manner (electrical tape in your right hand so the wire nut would not come loose. A lot of home owners and diyers have picked that habit up. Especially when the over stuff a box. So says my dad and grandfather…. So for being long winded… couldn’t sleep…
Not just that, many device manufacturers actually recommend wrapping a wire nut connection with electrical tape, which people would then unwittingly apply to all similar connections. I've seen this in the installation instructions for light fixtures, switches, and many smart home devices.
@@ElectricProAcademy , why are they any better than pushing wires into the back of a device, that by the way you don't like? Don't the Wago's work on the same principle? Not sure I would trust them.
Pete, I just rewatched that and I should've said, "MCM/KCMIL stands for the unit of area of a circle with a diameter of 1/1,000 of an inch." Thanks for graciously interjecting.
I would assume because Handymen do not need to be licensed therefore often times do not have the in depth knowledge of the litany of local trade codes.
I agree Wago 221s are superb plus their technical documentation on it is a model for how manufacturers should be producing technical information on UK listed products.
@@ElectricProAcademy I agree with your statement about wire nuts over Wago s. A few places where I will use Wago’s is in heavy usage areas where a GFCI receptacle may go bad and need replaced over the lifespan of the house. Some electricians really crank down hard when pre twisting conductors for a wire nut and even the pigtails going to the receptacle is hard to at to replace the GFCI. Also a GFCI is larger than a standard receptacle and using WAGOs makes it much easier to get the all of the conductors and the GFCI back into the box
I wish NEC would do away with 14 gauge. 12 should be the minimum with everything requiring electric connections for charging, computing, tablets, phones, LED this, USB that.. Granted, they don't consume much power, but people buy strips so they can connect 20 things to ONE outlet. So there is more than lamps and fans being run these days. I would like to see Romex cable that starts at 12 gauge, and ALL wires insulated. The ground should be insulated with green. I would like to see those wires insulated with the heat resistant wire that's used in appliances like irons, toasters, and toaster ovens. It's like a tightly woven material of some kind. The outer sheathing can remain plastic. Also, conduit should be all metal. No plastic, no nylon. I am replacing ALL my wire with 12 gauge. All new projects have 12 gauge. No 14 gauge is purchased nor used on any projects I do myself. I am also going around my house and replacing all wire nuts with Wago lever nuts. I love them. So much better.
The use of a particular wire size is up to the contractor. That being said I did not use any #14 wire in my home except as a light switch runner. All branch circuits were # 12 and dedicated circuits such as water heater, air cond., stove, RV service were sized according to the loads.
Music back track is very distracting. Please allow us to hear your words clearly by NOT adding annoying music like it's a Friday night carnival distract and redirect.
11:37 - the DryConn connectors are rated for direct burial only for low voltage landscape wiring (30 volts or less). You cannot direct-bury them for line voltages. www.kinginnovation.com/pics/db/docs/35-5010002AWAquaRedREVK.pdf (read the section to the right of the UL logo).
