60 Amp Sub-panel Install with Inspection

hey what's going on guys today I got a little little project I'm running through with you guys I installed a sub panel here in my garage not electrician CPA so not licensed to do this but pretty detail-oriented we also got a city inspection coming up so I want to try and get as much of that on camera as I can so I'm trying to make this like something of a ultimate beginner's guide you know you you have your panel in your garage and you want to add some power in here a couple extra outlets maybe you're looking to run and evie charging outlet something like that so I'm gonna try and keep this as basic as possible so let's start right here in the main panel and then we'll run through everything from there all right alright guys so if you've never seen one of these this is the inside of a main breaker panel in a house what we've got coming in right up here actually before I even start I want to kind of clear up a a slight misconception and some people think that when you flip off this main breaker right here at the top it's kind of like a free-for-all in there like like it's a dead panel and that is actually not the truth because if we think about this all we've done by shutting this breaker off is is do you Electrify everything below this right so if we take a look at all these these individual circuit branch breakers we can use our non voltage circuit detector and we can we can see that they are indeed dead right because we we flip the main breaker so we've we've cut off the flow of electricity to each of these but we haven't cut off the feed from the utility and we can see right here that these are still definitely live so be very careful so that's what I got to work with so just be careful when you're in here and all you have to do is turn off the main breaker because you will still have these live up here so what we've got coming in on the left and right are two hots basically these are 120 volts each out of phase so between the two is 240 volts which is why we get 240 volts when tap each phase on a two-pole breaker whereas individual 120 amp circuits like this these are all the electrical and lighting circuits in the house these are 120 volts to ground or neutral and the bigger circuits in the house I think this one is the range I think this one is the dryer 40 and 30 amps at 240 volts because we're actually grabbing both phases about 120 degree 120 volts out of phase from each other the center one here is our neutral and this balances the load between the two so when you hear about hots and neutral so that is what they were referring to of coming in from the utility two hots one neutral and you'll see over here there's a green grounding screw at the main service box here the green grounding screw bonds the neutral and the ground so basically we have here this goes to I think it's called au fer Kant member what it stands for but it's basically an electrode embedded in the foundation of my house and then this one right here goes out to a separate grounding rod so at the main panel here they're grounded or they're bonded excuse me and that's what this green screw here signifies so whether whether current rather return current in your house goes to the ground or goes through the neutral wire they both ends up in the same place here at the main box this is actually unbonded at the at the sub panel box we'll get to that in a second here is the new here's my new circuit I have installed it's a 60 amp breaker so I'm feeding a 60 amp subpanel and one thing to kind of keep in mind and when you're planning all this is breakers protect downstream wires and why that little bit of information is important is because breakers are sized to the wires they are protecting so we'll see each of these these are each 20 amp breakers and coming out of them are 12 and 12 gauge wire and you can find that information just look up American wire gauge amperage rating and there's a bunch of NEC charts out there National Electric Code that explain or that match amperages two wire sizes so in our 40 amp breaker right here we have eight gauge wire coming out for our 30 amp breaker which is going to our dryer we have 10 gauge wire right here is our 60 amp breaker that's leads to our sub panel it's protecting 6 gauge wire now if we actually look at that NEC chart that I talked about a few minutes ago we'll find that 6 gauge wire is only rated to 55 amps but there is an exception in the NEC that allows us to use the next standard size breaker up because nobody makes a 55 amp breaker so the 60 amp breaker is permitted to protect 6 gauge wire so we have our hot a hot again hitting both of these phases of 120 volts we have our neutral wire right here which is providing the load balancing return and we also have our ground right here and really because they're bonded like this green screw up here shows us it's really leading to the same spot so that's about that's about the tour of the main electrical panel here but again you know the key takeaway here is that we bond our neutral and our ground at the main panel only and breakers are sized to the wire they are protecting okay it's fun alright guys so I'm going to give you kind of a brief overview of what I did here right here this is our 6-3 romex or an MDF be in wall electrical service wire it is run through board holes in the studs except at this corner here which I couldn't really get to so I touched it here using the twenty-five percent notching role and where the wire passes through the knotch I used mail plates because this is a code requirement with the assumption being that in the future someone might try and nail or screw in this area and we don't want them nailing or screwing into a live electrical wire this runs straight over through again some board holes and the load-bearing studs right up to our sub panel and this is again six gauge wire protected by a 60 amp breaker from there I've installed a 30 amp 240 volt only circuit which you can kind of see here is signified by these three holes only when you see a four hole 240 volt outlet that means the appliance can pull both 120 and 240 volts from the circuit this is a 30 amp circuit and it's protected by 10 gauge wire I've also installed a dedicated 20 amp 120 volt circuit over here running off-camera is a 8 gauge romex wire which is feeding a 40 amp circuit that will be used either for my welder or for an electric car I don't currently own I haven't really decided what I'm going to use that one for yet right here this is PVC conduit 1/2 inch inside is 12 gauge individually stranded wire so when you are running wire inside conduit you do not run romex or jacketed in wall cable like this you run individual conductors and this is running out to my detached storage shed that's the overview of what is happening in the sub panel wiring so let's poke with this up now and we can take a look at what goes on inside this as opposed to what happens in the main panel alright so inside the sub panel here we've gone ahead and cut power at that 60 amp breaker and we can verify that again using our non-contact voltage detector you can see right here we are dealing with two dead circuits so it's relatively safe to be in here right now we have a 40 amp two-pole breaker which is bridging the two phases of 120 volt and it is protecting 8 gauge wire we have a 30 amp breaker that will be running a shop theater now you might see something different here hope you can see this on camera unlike the red and black wires we have that signify hot running out to our 40 amp circuit we actually have a black and a white wire that's because the cable used is 10 - so in this cable it is sort of wired for a hot and a neutral and we're actually using this neutral wire as a hot and to signify that we're doing that we have to kind of mark it as such so I've shrink-wrapped some black on here to let whoever and isn't here in the future know that this even though it is white and is traditionally a neutral colored wire is actually a hot conductor we also have our neutral here so I showed you guys that green bonding screw in the main panel in a sub panel that would normally go right there and this will come with your sub panel and by the way this is a square D sub panel I purchased off Amazon I'll place a link below I like Square D stuff simply because not because I think it's really better or worse than any other brand it's just because it's available literally everywhere you go to Home Depot Lowe's ace McClendon's here in Seattle everyone queries Square D breakers it's it's sort of like the the most common brand at least least in the northwest that I've ever seen you know I'm sure Siemens or GE or cutler hammer are all just fine and work perfectly well but I've noticed that their availability is a little more limited so that's why I like these Square D panels I also really like these Square D panels because in the most recent revisions of the National Electric Code we are required to protect 120 volt circuits with both GFCI and AFCI breakers actually you can do it with AFCI GFCI outlets but it's a lot easier to do it right here at the panel because then we can run our romex ahead of it so basically that's why you see this kind of large looking breaker this is a combination ground fault and arc fault interrupting breaker so it's gonna protect the circuit from any current flowing in the ground which is basically telling the circuit that something might be you know malfunctioning in the attached equipment and the arc fault function basically protects from like arcs and wire or you know maybe a stripped wire coming in contact with another conductor or something like that the downside of these is even though they are very nice they are very expensive a normal just non GFCI non AFCI 20 amp square d breaker would probably cost four or five dollars where these a AFCI GFCI breakers cost about $50 so you know it's it's a nice peace of mind to have and it's required by the NAC but they are expensive so over here a lot of times these panels do not come with ground bars because the expectation is that they will be used as main panels and the this green grounding screw that is included that you're not going to use will be in place thus bound thus bonding the ground in neutral but because we don't do that we have to add a separate ground bar which is over here and these sometimes they come in kits most of the time they have to be purchased separately so this entire sub panel box not including breakers obviously was about thirty-eight dollars on Amazon and then this ground bar kit right here was about three dollars and doesn't even have to be the same brand really they're pretty Universal they use ten thirty two screws basically to just attach to the box here and just yeah so this is actually I think a I don't know it may be a Siemens ground bar kit I purchased at Home Depot and I only purchased it as opposed to the square d brand because it was on clearance it only cost a couple dollars that's why I did that okay that's the overview of our subpanel box now I'm gonna close things up and I'm gonna kind of flip the breaker back on and try and maybe run over how I test a few of these circuits and get an idea of whether things are wired correctly alright guys so I've turned the power back on to the sub panel back at the main breaker flip the 60 amp breaker back on so what I'm gonna do now is use my multimeter and just kind of verify that we have the expected voltages and continuity to ground that we would expect to have I know we talked about my separate non-contact voltage detector earlier they're very handy and very cheap and allow us to very quickly verify whether a load is live or not and you can see here it is however if you purchase a multimeter like this unit a lot of them have non-contact voltage detectors built in I'll place a link to this one in the description below it is very handy and only runs about thirty dollars and we can see here or up at the top is a little thing that says NC v non-contact voltage and we can use it just like we use our little separate one and verify there that this is a live wire so now if we turn it from non-contact voltage mode over to voltage detection select AC zero it out we're going to use our probes here and remember how we said before on a 240 volt circuit we are really just bridging to 120 volt circuits so between what we should expect to see if we have done everything right is between these two hots 240 volts between either of these hots and the ground 120 volts and between either of these two hots and even this metal casing with if it's properly bonded which it should be 120 volts from our ground to our bonded an enclosure zero volts so let's see what we've got here from my light on there maybe alright so we can see there we have 243 volts between our two hots between one hot and our ground we can get them in there sometimes these plugs are kind of big and it's kind of tough to find exactly where the contacts line up there we go between our hot and our ground 122 volts between our other hot and our ground 122 volts and to check whether this is properly bonded what we can do is grab a hot and see if we get 122 volts to the enclosure 122 volts so I think we can safely say that this particular outlet is properly wired 120 volt circuits are even easier we can buy a circuit detector again not sure with these 100 percenter called but they basically just plug into 120 volt outlet and with these three lights tell you whether it's properly wired doesn't plug that in we see two oranges I basically the left red is off to oranges if we read the little key up top you can see that I don't think that'll be big enough to come on camera we basically see nothing orange orange is correct these also provide another function and that is to verify the circuit is ground faults are interrupted so if we press this little test button on top it's going to divert a little bit of that hot current into the ground and should flip the breaker and we press this button these two lights should turn off if you hear that that was the breaker indeed detecting a ground fault and interrupting electrical flow to this outlet and turn the circuit back on and we see that we again have power to this and this is probably a tool that the inspectors going to use okay the next thing I want to show you is our conduit run out to our storage shed it is one half inch schedule 40 PVC conduit if you're if you've never run conduit before I would highly recommend going PVC route it is very forgiving very easy to cut and just generally a lot easier to use than EMT or metallic conduit also if I'm being honest this particular run of conduit is one of the things I'm slightly concerned about on the inspection simply because if we were to notch this stud and run this PVC conduit through it we would need a nail plate on the front just like we have with our omics cable over there well this isn't notched into the stud but it will be running relatively close to the finished drywall so I couldn't figure out a good code reference to whether this needs some kind of metallic protector on it right now it doesn't obviously and if the inspector doesn't call it out I'm just gonna leave it as is if he does then I'll have to fabricate something so let's go outside and I'll show you the rest of the run all right this is the trench that the half-inch PVC conduit is buried in normally PVC conduit needs to be very deeper than this but there is an exception in the NEC that allows for a reduced burial depth on PVC conduit carrying a single 20 amp or less circuit that is also GFCI protected aka storage shed or outhouse circuits so what that reduced depth is is six inches to the top of the pipe covered by two inches of poured concrete and we can see here I put Sprite more like three inches of concrete so the pipe itself the top of the pipe is actually about seven or eight inches down and then I've got two or three inches of concrete on top of it and the basically idea behind that is that in the future if somebody is out here with a shovel or something they're not going to accidentally shove their shovel into a live wire this is actually item number two that I'm slightly concerned about on the inspection the other reason is I found conflicting information on the requirement of whether I need to lay electrical marketing tape in here basically it's like a red tape that just says electrical line or something like that on it some forums seem to indicate that it's required others don't so for now I don't have any and if the inspector calls it out I'll go buy some if not then I'm just gonna repair it alright guys that is the conclusion of my sub panel installation just to recap we have a 60 amp breaker in our main panel protecting six gauge wire that runs over to this panel in this panel we have a 40 amp breaker protecting 8 gauge wire we have a 30 amp breaker protecting 10 gauge wire and we have 220 volt 20 amp circuits each protecting 12 gauge wire the inspection I'm going to order today so it might take place tomorrow or the next day and I'll try and get as much of that on camera as I can I don't know how comfortable and inspector is gonna be with a camera on them or if not I might just kind of discreetly place the camera and get a wide angle over before you guys yes so this is all new yeah yeah so to the sheds of this year yes [Music] yes okay thank you very much yeah wow that was like super easy so the inspection went as well as I could have hoped no issues called out and completed in less than 10 minutes interestingly he didn't seem all that interested in the 240 volt circuits or even the sub panel itself outside of making sure the breakers were correctly sized for the wires they were protecting and that these circuits were individually labeled the only place he opened anything up was out in the shed where it's 120 volts only out there he made sure a disconnecting switch did indeed cut power to the entire building and that she the GFCI function was operating as expected other than that it was super low-key I've read some forum horror stories about inspectors that would give him ler a run for his money but in my limited experience those type are either the exception or I just got lucky overall he came across as very professional he didn't seem concerned with nitpicking the install instead focusing on ensuring there weren't any major or obvious code violations in any case I can call this project done and we'll see you next time

Channel: Aaron's Test Lab

Views: 162,934

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Id: x0MxrbQASFU

Length: 25min 17sec (1517 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 03 2020