2 Tricks To Tighten Loose Electrical Outlets, Switches

[Music] everybody JIP here welcome back to the channel here where we give you all sorts of world-class advice on how to remodel your kitchens your bathrooms how to fix all sorts of engineering disasters around your house like this loose outlet right here that you see here today and if this is your first time here and you haven't subscribed yet make sure you click on that subscribe button down below while it's fresh on your mind and click the little gray belt icon next to it that will make sure that you get alerted every time we upload a video because you don't want to miss a single one and YouTube won't tell you unless you click on that great bulb icon area so today we're going to show you how we're going to fix this loose outlet here so this is my friends place here and they have it under contract with a buyer and the buyers home inspector came in and did this whole analysis report here gave a whole bunch of findings here and one of the items that they flagged here was this loose electrical outlet this is a very common problem that we see in houses and unfortunately it's something that you shouldn't have allowed it to get to the point where the inspector found it because you could have easily fixed this yourself and save yourself the aggravation later on the buyer is probably going to walk unless all of these get fixed so today we're going to show you how to fix this loose electrical outlet and it all starts right now knowing some of the things that they found here it says right here the hallway outlet is loosely mounted secure the outlet so we're going to fix that so we should always think safety first and we always recommend that you cut the power to the outlet here before you do anything those of us who have worked things like this before and we're used to dealing with this we usually don't it's not the most safest thing in the world to do but we're also not digging around there we know what to avoid and what not to touch if we're just adjusting the fact that the outlets loose but for you you should definitely cut the power because see how loose this is here okay so now that we see that the power is off to the outlet we can sort of feel around in there with our chests are there power on and any of the wires in there so we're fine because we need to find out why is it loose inside it because it really shouldn't be so we're gonna take a flathead screwdriver right here and this is a flathead screw here yours might be a Philips head but whatever it is just get the appropriate screwdriver and take off the one screw that's holding that plate in there okay and we can remove it here now make sure not to stick your fingers on either side of there because that's where the wires are tight and part of the problem here is that the and I see this so many times folks over the years it's not even funny I'd say almost 90% of all electrical outlets I've ever seen going all the way back as a teenager to every house that was built down here they make the hole too big so you see the see how on the bottom it's gripping here these these brackets here are supposed to grab on to the wall if you make the drywall hole too big there'll be nothing for it to grab onto so that's why it's good it's doing this now so you're pretty much screwed you're you're left without a without really much that you can do here now they have goofed rings that you can buy to put in there that would that would sort of fix all of that too but we're going to see if we can do this here today without it especially since this plastic plate here was already cracked and this is why I don't like using plastic every wall I've ever worked on was crooked or had issues or the outlet had issues and the metal plates just simply don't break you've got to have a metal plate you can't be using plastic on this kind of nonsense here so what we're going to do now is loosen the screw here to get the outlet back out sort of to where it should be again this is another case where they used a screw that was way longer than it needed to be probably because they knew there was problems with us all that and I come on you didn't need to screw that long for this you think all you have to do is just tighten something down a lot of times what you think is gonna be the simplest little repair ends up costing you a lot of problems or a couple of trips to the store luckily we already had this extender here we're going to see if this Xbox extender here will work and fill in some of that slack for us okay so I have the that box extender and they know what I did was I just cut a slit in it just so I could get it around there without having to undo everything some people don't like doing that and they feel you might have more strength of you if you don't do that if you just leave it in one piece and nothing wrong with that - with leaving at one piece but I want to see because we're just using it to buy us as a shim like a spacer so we just want to see if we can get it to screw into the to the outlet box and pull the outlet box out so now we tighten it down here at the plate on there and even though the plates correct I am still gonna buy another plate let's see how this looks I mean he's not he's not pop well it's the plate really that's popping up but I want to see is the outlet itself popping out yeah it's a teeny bit loose we can adjust it some more okay so the reason I showed you this box extender trick here is once in a blue moon it'll work but it will only work if you can ear brackets here - to get up in front of the drywall but so you can see this is sort of a fool's errand here because see you're still going to have this kind of movement going on and it doesn't do you any good to keep tightening it because if you keep tightening the screw you're gonna just force the outlet back up against it like that so that's useless so you have to ditch this idea and go with a whole different tactic here which I will show you now okay so we're going to pull the outlet back out here we're going to remove our box extender here okay so now that we have it back off again and we're going to before we implement our solution I just wanted to point out see how loose the whole boxes and not only is it loose but it's going at an angle backwards to the right so here and and first of all I always prefer these outlet boxes to be flush with the surface so this thing wasn't even installed at the right depth it should be flush with the surface and then it shouldn't be leaning back at an angle like that - so that's going to be problematic for us and we'll have to see if we can correct that I doubt that we'll be able to correct this because they never cut this hole even right I don't even know if it's cut to the right width but they definitely cut the hole as we know - big from top to bottom because talk part the ears are hanging over the drywall fine but on the bottom part they're floating and that's why we have this problem we're going to fix this problem with two new parts so you'll see here I got a nice beautiful metal plate this is actually my favorite plate these are the ones I use when I'm doing all of my remodeling and my foreclosure units here because a lot of times when you're dealing with these we find that that quite often the holes are cut too wide and so this is a wider plate you can see it barely covers but it's a wider plate than you normally get so this will provide and sustain the necessary forces we need up against the wall there and then the other product we need here are these outlet spacers and I'll show you how these work they're really cool they come on these strips here and when you have these strips here you basically take these here and you start folding them up to whatever width you need and they snap right into each other here kind of like that see so they there are eighth of an inch at a time so like right there is 3/8 of an inch right there so you you kind of measure that distance back that that outlet box is sitting and that's the distance you need to shim up you need to shim up that gap where the screws are gonna go here through the outlet through that airspace right there and it goes right through these shims so now when I run the screw in I'm not going to keep screwing the outlet and pushing the outlet back it's actually gonna maintain that distance from the front ledge there to where the box is so that way it can't push so there's a lot of code violations in this one outlet anyway because see all of these wires here they should be able to come like six inches out of the wall there and then you see how they they terminated the romex in here how it comes into the box here but the sheathing is still there so you can barely see it back there so this is not really supposed to extend more than a quarter to a half an inch beyond where it enters into the box that's just sloppiness I have folded up enough of these parts of the that we've got a half an inch here we've got four sections here so you can see as we screw it in here you're gonna see the shim is gonna start moving in and occupying that gap there and when it touches against the box there that will set the thickness so now we don't have to worry about the outlet going into the wall anymore because now it's gonna draw the outlet box towards us okay one of these either the top of the bottom is going to see the drywall so I think yes we put the shim on the bottom there will let the top of it of here have the drywall now you may end up with a case where you have air up on top and here on the bottom in that case you'd have to put shims on both sides but since we don't have that here we're not going to bother we can just put the screw right into the outlet here and we can start screwing this right in all right so since we have the case where this outlet is the hole is just way too big vertically so very little of this as ever is going to grip any of the drywall so remember when you're dealing with movement what makes these outlets wiggle is they're moving back see that and they pull forward as well too so what you have to do is we have to minimize that right there whether they can't push back when we're going to do that by adding another space or up top there to fill in that gap that it's pushing backwards okay so let's put the spacer here okay now tighten this down here that spacer there will prevent this outlet the top of this outlet from leaning back inside like it was trying to do before now it looks a lot more solid there okay so it can't pull out remember I was able to push it back and pull it up so it's a little little more solid in place than it was it's not gonna be perfect because as long as this box back here can move then you're going to have this issue other things we've tried in the past as we get peel adhesive and you fill in these gaps with it and it solidifies it right in place in it and it pretty much holds it really good it'll stick even to this drywall here to the core of the drywall the gypsum in there but yeah whoever put this box in was clearly drunk I will put the plate and see if we get the screw to get in there so we're relying on the plate it's metal and it's strong so we are relying on its ability to push against the wall while sucking the outlet forward see how it's pulling it the duplex right into the frame so you just kind of sucks it forward there so that's on there like rock-solid okay so there's our level there so we know we're straight up and down so it's looking pretty good there all right so I've turned the power back on I'm gonna just double check the outlet he's good there check out that one and you notice how it didn't he didn't yank or slide or anything look it's just nice and tight in there so let's let's just review the physics here of what's going on how did this work why is it nice and tight now and before it was so loose well there's two things that need to happen you need to stop the forces go in that way and you need to stop the forces coming this way outs out of the wall right so by doing this here by putting the plate here okay by having this plate here the very fact that that screw is right there in the plate is attached to the outlet this opposes any forces that want to pull the outlet back into the wall so that's why it doesn't want to go and see nice and tight only because it's attached if I took this screw off you'd probably be able to push these in as you saw before because by putting that screw in it attracted the outlet out outward this way right so now what keeps us from pulling out well it's the fact that the outlet box is in there sort of reasonably snug not all that great but we had those spacers in there too that keep that keep the outlet at the same distance as the the outlet boxes because they're tied through those spacers that are eating up that gap if we didn't eat up the gap with those shims those spacers there you would be able to push the outlet all the way in and probably back out too it just allows it to move travel along the body of that that distance there on the screw yeah so this outlet had a very miraculous recovery here let me look at this just not budging but before it was just pulling away from the wall [Applause] they'll be finding this video useful so far and as you can see there's a whole lot of information for you to take in here you can't just bust into one of these outlets and start messing around unless you really know what you're doing so we showed you two what to do here and we made it come out right for you and if you found this video useful make sure you go ahead and give us a thumbs up down below that tells us that you like us and if you haven't subscribed to us yet and you want to stay up to date and up your game on home repairs and home remodeling and all sorts of other tool reviews then go ahead and smash that like button down below there and after you do that make sure you click that little gray bell icon next to it that way you'll be alerted every 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Channel: jeffostroff

Views: 281,621

Rating: 4.7682419 out of 5

Keywords: loose electrical box, loose electrical box in wall, loose electrical plug, loose outlet, loose outlet box, loose outlet fix, loose outlet hack, loose outlet plug, loose outlet box fix, loose outlet box repair, electrical fails, electrical outlet, electrical outlet spacers, electrical outlet spacer shims, electrical outlet spacer, outlet plate, outlet plate spacer, jeff ostroff, jeffostroff, wiggly electrical outlet, fix loose outlet, how to fix loose outlets, tighten outlet

Id: aV6Mu_7ye3Y

Length: 14min 45sec (885 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 29 2020