7 FATAL Wiring Mistakes Most DIYers Don't Know They Are Making | Most Are Guilty of 3

we are going to be going over some of the biggest mistakes that diy-ers and yes some electricians make when connecting wires together and of course we'll be going over how to properly connect them together and also some better practices so let's go ahead and Jump Right In let's go all right so because this is the most common connection that's made we're going to start off with solid core to solid core so what the majority of people do when they're connecting wires together is they'll take their two wires they'll put them up next to each other and then they'll just take their wire nut put it in on top and then they'll just tighten it down to where they're getting some resistance and then they'll call this good well the problem with this is while these two wires are up inside of the wire nut they are connected currently this was not done by the manufacturer's instructions but when you only just barely twist it on you're not going to get that connection and you could run the risk of it being actually a loose connection and over time one of these wires just being able to fall out so to give you a demonstration while nobody's going to be in your wall pulling on your wires wires do vibrate due to the current flowing through them and that's why eventually they can fall out over time if you don't have a nice tight connection using a wire nut this is what can happen so while both of these wires were connected underneath of this wire nut the problem again is the instructions were not followed as to how they should have been installed and we were completely relying on the wire nut in order to make the connection and hold these wires together so if you're not a believer in pre-twisting let me show you at least what the manufacturer says it should look like when you just use the wire nut to twist it on you see how the two wires are up next to each other now that's a solid cord and that's a stranded but it's the same for the solid core where you're going to have them up next to each other and then you want to have this nice twisting going on down below the wire nut and the reason for that is this so let's go ahead and put the wire nut back on and let's twist this on per the instructions we saw on the packaging all right so as you can see I've got some nice braiding going on down below the wire nut not only are you going to get support holding the wires together down here below but if we take this wire nut off or for whatever reason this wire nut was to just fall off once we take the wire nut off as you can see due to us twisting it the way that we did it has formed a joint between these two wires to where they are essentially fastened together they are not relying on the wire nut to hold them together they are completely braided together underneath of the wire nut so you know you're going to have a really good connection and again there's no way that they are just going to fall apart so this is a good and acceptable method but let me show you what is a more preferred method by many electricians so this is what a lot of electricians will do they will strip just a little bit more insulation off than you normally would they'll take their lineman pliers and they will do what I've already referred to but they will do what is called pre-twisting and and the reason that they do this is again they know that this is going to form a nice tight joint to where those wires are not depending on the wire nut to hold it together and you know that you're going to have plenty of surface contact between the wires and also by doing this before putting the wire nut on they're able to verify that they do in fact have a very tight bond between the wires and then just cut off the top that's when then they would take a wire nut and then put it in on top so in this case with pre-twisting the wire nut is primarily used as an insulator to make sure that those hot leads don't touch anything that they shouldn't and while these wires don't necessarily need the help of the wire nut holding them together it does still help to reinforce that nice tight Bond underneath of the wire nut now this mistake is one that I see almost all the time and that's using the wrong wire nut for the job so in this case I've got this yellow Ideal wire nut and I've got four number 12 wires and what somebody will do is they'll take wires that are too large and the quantity is too many for the wire nut that they're using but they will somehow find a way to be able to shove all those wires up into that wire nut like so so we've got all of our wires nothing's just falling out but I can guarantee you that this wire nut is way over loaded and one of these wires is going to be extremely easy to pull out and there it is that one right there the first clue that you're overloading a wire nut is it's going to be very hard to get all of the wires to actually see up inside of the wire nut and then once you get a wire nut on you should always give the wires a pull and if you've overloaded a wire nut more than likely you're going to get the result that I did where this one was able to be pulled out extremely easy now on the flip side of that somebody might be using one of these bigger blue wire nuts and say they have two 12 gauge wires well they'll go they'll put their wires up into the wire nut they'll go and they'll tighten it down as you can see they're not just falling out but with any Force at all pulling on one of these wires they're just going to fall right out so the minimum size that can go in this blue wire nut is 12 gauge wire but with a minimum of at least three wires and it's incredibly easy to know what your wire nut is capable of almost on every single package that you can buy in the store of wire nuts they're going to have this bar graph on the back back or sometimes it's on the side that's going to list exactly what size of wire will fit in that particular color and that kind of wire nut and then also the quantities of that size and then it's going to give you the minimums and the maximums of each of the different wire nuts on the packaging now I'm about to get into a really important tip so don't go anywhere but really quickly if you could do me a huge favor if you're finding value in this video so far if you could hit that thumbs up button right down below or leave me a comment down in the comment section about what you think about it it really does help the video out to spread out to other people and hopefully be able to help them out as well I really appreciate it let's get back into it so this next one is an incredibly common connection that has to be made and that's between solid core and Stranded I would say that this is probably the hardest one to get right and probably one of the most common ones to fail so most of the time you've got your solid core wire running throughout your house and then you might be installing like a light fixture or ceiling fan and almost every time they're going to come with this stranded wire and with the fixture they usually include some sort of crappy wire nut like this one here which oftentimes are not necessarily designed to help promote twisting the wires together underneath of the wire nut so what most people will do is they'll take their two wires and they'll just put them up right next to each other and then they'll take their crappy wire nut and then they'll put that in on top now this is where it's really not that uncommon that we see issues pop up so let's twist this wire nut back off and as you can see while we had the two wires up next to each other when the wire nut was being put on you can see that that stranded wire is now down below the solid core wire and this almost always happens and is why it's so important to make sure that you follow the instructions because the instructions would have told you to do something a little bit differently and so while we might think that we have a good connection here because we tighten it on pretty tightly it's really not that hard for that stranded wire to just be pulled out of there and as you can see on the stranded wire itself it never even tried to make an attempt to wrap itself around the solid core wire so the easiest way that this should be done is if we take our two conductors here we want our stranded wire to be a little bit longer than the solid core wire at our starting point before we get the wire nut put on so now let's go ahead and instead of using a crappy wire nut like this one it's always better to use a name brand wire nut like this one that's made by ideal because they just do a better job of wrapping the wires so let's go ahead put those in there and tighten it down and like we've done before we want to make sure that we keep tightening it down to where we have some nice winding going on down below the wire nut all right so we got a little bit of nice winding going on down below the wire nut there's just no way that that wire is ever going to be pulled out of that wire nut it's getting support from the winding here below the wire nut and then let's go ahead and take the wire nut off and you see this time the stranded wire is right on up there as long as the solid core conductor is and it's also attempting to wrap itself around that solid core conductor for the most part you will probably never have an issue with this connection here but especially when it comes to connecting stranded to solid core another really good option to use would be these Wago lever nuts here and these are great especially for this circumstance because you don't have to worry about those wires being Twisted together and while these can be incredibly easy to use we're going to go over some mistakes that I've seen and some of the issues that come with those mistakes and then also how to fix them so of course the way that these work is they've got these levers on them that you just flip up in order to insert the wires into the ports here so we'll go ahead and insert our wires once the wire is in there you can just flip it down and now at this point these wires would be ready to be pushed back into a box and that's where I've seen a huge issue come in is when people go to push these into the back of the box all they're focused on is trying to get all their wires into the box sometimes it can be difficult to do there have been instances where these levers get caught on wires and because you're pushing so hard it will pull the lever up and unbeknownst to the installer they think everything is connected and they're ready to install their new device when really one of their wires is not secured at all and can just fall out so it's really important that when you go to push these into the back of a box I like to put my fingers over the levers as I'm pushing it back into that box and I won't take my thumb off of those levers until I have my wires placed the way that I want them to now another option that can be taken is to take some electrical tape and just wrap it around the Wago making sure that you're going over those levers and this way the levers can't be pulled up even if you wanted to the next mistake I see being made is people will go to install their wiring so we'll just go ahead and push those into each of the ports flip down the levers now those wires are connected but as you can see we've got too much insulation removed from the wires and this can be dangerous in a box to where it could lead to arcing this is an unsafe installation here that could actually lead to a fire conversely I've seen where somebody's removed far too little insulation from one or both of the wires then they put their wires into the Wago and while nothing's exposed out here and everything seems to be secure and we probably won't have any fires that start from this I'll show you what can happen all right so we've got our connection made and this Wago here and this is the wire where not enough insulation was cut off of it so what will happen is somebody thinks that they've installed everything properly they'll turn their circuit breaker on maybe they'll take a non-contact voltage detector and just see if they've got power there which look at there we've got power going to that conductor there but then they wonder why when the receptacle that they've connected to this wire or the light switch that's connected to this wire why things don't work they're not getting power to it or maybe it's just working intermittently well while this non-contact voltage detector tells us that hey we've got power here let's use a Multimeter and see what's actually there so again our non-contact voltage detector is telling us that we've got active voltage there but when we go to test it with a multimeter it's showing that we're only getting like four and a half volts so you can have active power flowing through the wires and your non-contact voltage detector might tell you that you've got power flowing through it which you do but you do not have enough voltage or at least a consistent enough voltage depending on how the wires are to power up the things that you're wanting to power so how can we avoid these problems all together well if we flip it over here to the side on these wagos you'll see there's a strip gauge right here and as long as you strip off the insulation to be as long as this strip gauge is showing then you know for sure that you're stripping off the proper amount of insulation and guaranteeing a good connection so obviously in electrical it's very important to make sure that you're making good connections and that isn't just with wires it's also with any devices that you're going to be installing such as receptacles or light switches so if you'd like to learn more about some of the biggest mistakes that are made when installing those devices and of course then also how to better install them I'll post a link to a video right over here here if you click on it now it will take you directly to it if not I hope that you found value in this video and if you did if you could do me a huge favor hit that thumbs up button right down below and of course if you have any questions or comments still you can leave those down in the comment section and I'll catch you all in the next one see ya

Channel: How To Home

Views: 7,186,612

Keywords: Electrical Wiring, Electrical Wiring Mistakes, How to Connect Wires, How to connect wires together, how to connect electrical wires, how to connect electrical wires together, how to splice wires, how to splice electrical wires, Biggest Mistakes when connecting wires together, how to use a wire nut, wago, wago 221, wirenut

Id: -jeP1d8PC1I

Length: 13min 0sec (780 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 01 2023