5 Biggest DIY Mistakes Wiring a Socket

so in today's video I'm going to cover common mistakes that DIYs make when wiring up sockets so first one here is no grommets now the reason this is a problem is these cables are likely going to be in these boxes for 40 50 years and these metal boxes you get sharp edges where the Knockouts are put out and cables moving over time when people take sockets on and off for decorating or changing the covers highly likely that at some point you're going to start penetrating this outer Shea thing and potentially the insulation around the cores as well and you could cause faults so quite a common one actually you've got rcds dripping in homes is stuff like this where you're catching on Sharp bits of black boxes or metal conduit that kind of thing so here you can see you've got no grommets and the cable can quite quickly rub and you can see there you've already I've only done it a few times you've got all these score marks on the side of the cable and that over many years can cause problems correct way is to have a rubber grommet like this very inexpensive very easy to fit now the next area is people cutting cables Too Short personally I like to have about two inches from the furthest point past the box so if you're coming in in the bottom corner like this go to your furthest side and then have a couple of inches after that if you're in the middle obviously it's a little bit less but just go to all the sides and check so you get this ample for the top there but far this side not so much whereas if you're in the middle if they're coming through one of these you wouldn't need quite so much so common DIY mistake is to just cut the cables far too short so something like this you might find DIYs done which you will be able to get into the back of your socket still it'll just be a real pain now I like to strip cables with these Stanley strippers but you can use a Stanley knife now the reason you leave plenty of cable length is make it easy to get the socket on in future when these cables start to get old you might want to trim them back and make off the cable again so you get a bit of fresh copper they've been screwed and unscrewed many times and also different sockets have different layouts here you've got earth live neutral but this layout isn't uniform so this is just an older socket this is actually from December 09 more commonly you'll have all three in the middle but different brands do different things so that's why I need to leave plenty of cable spare now next common mistake is where people take a single core like this and just stick it into these terminals so you can see how big that terminal is compared to the size of this cable because this is designed to get potentially three or even four cores in there and now common mistake for DIYs is to just stick this single core in there and do the screw up now I've just done the screw up and pushed that in there and you can see it has made a good connection the screw is clamped that's cable down it's not going anywhere the problem comes when you undo this I've removed cable from the back and you can see how much it squished the cable you can see the screw has really squished that down say this comes off a few times for decorating and things it gets moved it gets bent and you've creaced a weak point in the cable where it's much easier after a few bends for that to start to snap I only bent it a couple times there and it's already looking like quite a weak point and so you can get a really quite a poor quality connection now the correct way to make these off is to double these over so ideally what you want to work out is how deep that is about halfway so this would be perfectly fine to bend this over and then stick it in so now I've just bent that core over with a pair of pliers so now I've got applies the amount of surface area for that screw to come down on so this is into the neutral terminal and you can see there it's a much Fuller fit now I'm just going to screw down on that screw it tightly down on that and you can see there arguably it could be slightly shorter so you've got a little bit more insulation into the terminal but really that's perfectly acceptable connection and so you can see how the screw is clamped down perfectly evenly across those two cores now you can see here where the screw came down on that cable and hardly any damage not been squished much at all like the other one and that's because you're spreading it across twice as much cable the force of that screw so whenever you've just got a single cable coming into a socket you always want to be doubling over the ends like this if you've got two cables personally I don't think it's necessary now next era DIYs make is not earth in these back boxes you can see this top terminal here here I've got myself a off cut and that's just going to go in this terminal here and into this Earth terminal here so some sockets you'll find will have multiple Earth Terminals and that often one on each side doesn't really matter which one it goes into they'll usually have a bar like this going across so you'll get same continuity all the way through now here I've Earth the back box so I've got the fly lid there and we've got our cable in and out now common error that DIYs make is they will twist the Earth together and then sometimes leave them uncheased like that sometimes sheath over the top neither are acceptable though I've also seen people twisting together all of the cores not sure what the benefit of doing these would be but I have seen it and now the reason particularly on the cpcs on your Earth wires why this isn't an okay thing to do is that if you have a fault in your house you've got sockets tripping electrician would often come around trying to work out where the fault is and to do that they will often take the covers off a lot of sockets so they can try and narrow down where the fault is and they actually test either direction on the circuit so when electrician comes around trying to work out where the fault is they need to separate the wire so they can test either direction you can't test either direction when they're touching and as you can see you've got a bit of a mess there with those two separated it's going to be a nightmare to put any sleeving back on those when these cables are expected to be in the wall for 40 50 years you really start to weaken them by twisting and untwisting now if you're a DIY that takes a lot of attention to detail you'll make sure that all your screws are either vertical or horizontal and facing the same Direction my personal preference is vertical so both of these are vertical now if this were on a live circuit get a socket tester turn the circuit on just check all the connections are okay and then you'd be good to go

Channel: The Diligent DIYer

Views: 671,498

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Id: 3YGomxeKopI

Length: 6min 2sec (362 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 27 2023