5 Mistakes Everyone Makes Changing Sockets ❌

changing face plates one of those classic DIY jobs if you're a regular viewer of the channel you'll know that we don't do many tutorial Style videos because I don't like teaching people how to do their own electrics it just feels wrong however I know that some of you are going to do it anyway so today I'm going to teach you how to do it properly first here's the tools that you're going to need I'll leave a link in the description below a flathead screwdriver a level some cable Cutters and strippers a safe isolation device only joking use one of these so step one is to take the cover off but there's something important to do first a mistake to avoid and make sure you watch the end of the video where I show you the top five mistakes that most people make when changing sockets rewind this socket is currently live do not take the cover off without first safely isolating as George Clark would say the consumer unit is the Hub of the home now that's the kitchen but this is the Hub of your electrics in your home it's where everything is turned on and off from you've got a main switch so if you want to be super safe you could flick that off that'll turn everything off in the house or you can find the individual circuit that feeds the socket that you're wanting to change now in this case I think it's circuit two so I'm going to flick that off and check to see if the socket has gone dead or not so the Vault pen seems to indicate that the socket's dead which is a good indicator we'll take the cover off now but we do need to properly check and if you're really not sure which circuit it's on better to be safe and sorry just turn the main switch off for the whole house now a quick DIY tip always take a before photo before you make any changes so that you can look back and if something doesn't work properly see how it was before because it's almost impossible to put it back together how it was before without a photo now I use this fault pen just as a rough indication that it was turned off and it looks like it is but this is not a trusted device these can go wrong they can break they can give false readings so always use what we call a gs38 approved test lead like this and what you can do is just test between all the combinations that's just saying that there's continuity but we test between live and neutral neutral and Earth and life and Earth and then ideally what we want to do is turn the circuit back on check to make sure our tester is working properly on a known source and then turn it back off off again one of the biggest mistakes I see people doing is changing these live without turning the power off or turning off the wrong circuit and getting an electric shock you don't want to risk your life so if you're really not sure or don't feel confident just pay an electrician who will safely isolate it but if you are doing it yourself for goodness sake please turn the power off now in the socket we've got live neutral and Earth there's a big mistake that I see people making which is getting the live and neutral the wrong way around in other words reverse polarity and I'll tell you why they do that and how it's easy to avoid so the way this socket is arranged is live is on the left neutral is on the right but not all sockets are built the same some sockets have a neutral on the left and the live on the right and it might be that even the same brand they've changed the design and over time and they've swapped around where the terminals are so if you just pop the wires back in the order that they were on the previous socket you could end up having the live in neutral the wrong way around and the socket will work but it won't be safe now the reason reverse polarity is dangerous is because if you had the live and neutral the wrong way around and switch the switch off on the socket this switch often only switches the live that means that it would actually be switching to neutral and whatever's plugged in like maybe a lamp with a lamp socket at the end that would actually still be live even though you've turned the switch off and you could get an electric shock these MK sockets are really well built they're actually double poles so they switch to live and the neutral which is a nice extra safety feature but most sockets aren't like that and so reverse polarity can be a really easy mistake to make and a very dangerous fault to create So to avoid it just make sure that the live conductors are going into the terminal marked L the neutral conductors are going into the terminal marked n just make sure that they line up now in European wiring colors now they're harmonized so the brown is the live the blue is the neutral and the green yellow is the CPC or Earth however olden times in Britain about 20 years ago we used red and black so red was the live and black was the neutral so if you do find a red and black Cable in the UK then red is your live and black is your neutral now these green yellows are actually sleeved so they're bare copper with Earth's leaving in some installations if you change your socket you'll find that these are just spare copper nobody's ever sleeved them up now it is important to sleeve them properly because otherwise the bare copper of the earth wire could easily make contact with one of the live conductors and short out so always sleeve your Earth and there's another big mistake that a lot of people make which is twisting them together for one of my bug Bears why should you avoid that let me show you now you might think it's a good idea because it makes a nice connection between the two wires however for testing an inspection it's an absolute nightmare because there's a break in the ring circuit and an electrician needs to split these conductors up it's not as simple as just taking the socket face off and separating the ends they've got to physically remove the Earth's leaving and untwist the wires and also it can just put unnecessary strain on these wires and cause them to break prematurely which is not ideal so Earth sleeving comes on rolls like this I think it's 100 meter roll it's very cheap you can pick it up from your leg local electrical wholesaler and a little tip is just slide it over the wire like that and then to get it to the right length slide it right up to the butt of the cable bend it over then slide it back by the amount that you want to be exposed and then just cut it off like so and then slide it back now what I like to do is a nice little extra is just bend these over we call it doubling up bend them back over on themselves because the CPC wires are a little bit smaller than the main wires the live and neutral you want to get a bit of extra strength on it for when you screw your terminal screw into it so if you've only got two wires in a socket like this I would generally double them up like that and then it gets a better connection now you might notice at the back of the socket there's a little Earth terminal to Earth the back box of the socket this is not a hundred percent needed but it's a nice little touch to connect what we call a flying lead or a little bit of Earth wire into that and connect that into the face plate as well that just means that when you've got the face plate Off the Wall the back box is still Earth from the face plate normally it'll be Earth through the screws anyway when it's screwed back it's just a nice nice little touch not essential but if you want to do things really by the book and top-notch quality that's a nice thing that I would do so that flying lead is connected into the back box now and what I'll do in general is cut them to the same length as the main Earthwise so that will fit neatly into the back of the socket now we're fitting one of these USB sockets today which is one common reason why you might swap a face plate over and there's another easy mistake that people make when swapping USB sockets which is not having a deep enough back box so often the back boxes of sockets are quite shallow and they fit perfectly with a normal size socket like this but when it comes to fitting a USB socket it's quite a lot deeper and so you will need an extra deep back box so it sometimes turns a simple DIY job like swapping a face plate into quite a complicated one of changing a back box as well in which case you might need Plastering and decorating doing so this is the 35mm deep back box the standard back box depth in the UK for sockets is 25 mil that extra 10 mil makes all the difference so sometimes it's worth to check the depth of the back boxes before you start changing the sockets you can get some brands that have got quite slim back plates on the sockets to enable you to fit them with an old 20 five mil star back box but definitely worth a double check so the other day we came across a customer who had actually wired up his own house and he'd done brand new wiring like this but the trouble was he'd actually cut all the wires way too short in the back boxes so they were all cut back to like there and it was just impossible to then terminate them in properly he'd managed to do it somehow but he'd wired up all the sockets the wrong way around and we could barely even get the front covers off the sockets to check it was just a complete nightmare so we ended up having to rewire half of the sockets ourselves just to get the right length on the cables so I'd always advise you to make sure you don't strip them back far leave yourself plenty of wiring to just neatly tuck the wires into the back of the box and therefore you avoid that whole guitar string wiring disaster now to avoid loose connections there's a simple trick once you've tightened up the screw just give a little pull on the backs of the wires to make sure that they don't pull out of the terminals that indicates that they're all securely in place some sockets like this do have two Earth terminals one on each side so you can split the Earthwise between them but they're all joined by the metal bar along the back so it's fine to use both terminals in this case you've got three wires it just gives you a bit more space now you might find when screwing the socket back sometimes the screws will get threaded they use these little M 3.5 screws machine screws and they can easily get threaded and the lugs at the back of the box that the screw goes into just get threaded and you need to re-thread them so I've got one of these tools and I'll show you how to do that now so you can see this screw has been threaded because the lug has lost its thread so I'm going to use is this little 3.5 mil tap and you just line it up in a straight line into the lug of the socket and screw it in gently that should just re-thread that M 3.5 lug and enable you to then get a new screw in and it's sit back securely if you're an electrician this is a must-have in your tool bag and as with all the tools that we've used today I'll leave a link in the description below where you can pick some up for yourselves [Music] now the final step is very important you've got to test to see if it actually works and is safe so here I've got my plug-in tester this is an expensive professional piece of Kit which does lots of tests however you could use a simple plug-in voltage tester so as you can see here it's showing the voltage and I can even do an earth Loop impedance test to make sure it's all left correctly and an rcd test to make sure the rcd operates properly so to summarize the five mistakes you should avoid number one make sure you turn the power off number two make sure you get the polarity correct number three make sure you sleeve the Earth wires and connect them incorrectly number four don't twist wires together and number five don't cut the wires too short now I'm sure I've missed other classic mistakes that people make when connecting sockets so let me know all of the dodgy mistakes that you've found in the comments below and if you did enjoy this video why not like And subscribe to see some really high skilled electrical work done and as a disclaimer that I want to leave with you guys is that in general if you're not confident doing electrical work even a straight swap like this which can be done by a DIY just don't do it call a local qualified electrician but either way I hope you've enjoyed watching this video and if you have there's two more videos up here that YouTube thinks you might enjoy so why not grab a cup of tea and watch one of those

Channel: Artisan Electrics

Views: 395,771

Keywords: artisan electrics, electrician life, socket, mistake, five

Id: 8wSYX2wtADM

Length: 11min 44sec (704 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 19 2023