Beware Of These Wiring Mistakes Made On Newly Built Home

I was over at a friend's house the other night and they wanted me to take a look at an issue in their basement where a couple of their Outlets weren't working and they couldn't figure it out the circuit breaker wasn't trapped but there was no power being provided and they wanted me to take a look this home was brand new it was little over one year old and was built by a reputable builder in our area well when I took the face plate off one I could see the actual failure point that was providing no power to the circuit and additionally there was four mistakes or four shortcuts taken by these professionals that I do not recommend even as a DIY are doing projects around my own house so let's quickly run through these so you can avoid them on your own projects if you're taking on DIY electrical projects around your house safely into code but also if you're hiring out this type of work you're not doing it yourself but you do need to be an informed consumer to avoid these type of scenarios and then we'll finish up I will rewire this scenario I'll show you the better components to use and Tech techniques to use to get a more durable and longer lasting installation so let's jump into it I have a little mock-up here this is exactly how the outlet was wired it had three sets of 14 gauge Romex coming into the box and all being wired into a 15 amp residential grade Outlet you can easily see our mistake number one and that is any of these unused screw terminals this is the hot side indicated by the gold screw terminal and the neutral side you want to tighten those down you do not want to leave those hanging out there where they can come in contact with a metal electrical box or a neutral or ground wire that might be floating inside your box now this is easy enough right you just have to tighten them down it takes one second but it does slow down the overall job so sometimes you'll see this on job sites where they're trying to save a little bit on labor cost and they just leave those screw terminals hanging out there this is not best practice and you definitely want to tighten these down down so then when you look at the profile now we're flush and we don't have those screw terminals especially the hot side hanging out there when it comes to the second mistake I want to focus in on the actual method for wiring this Outlet you do have a few different options and I do not think they took the best path so the method used to wire this was actually two different methods because they're bringing so many wires into one Outlet one we had what's called side wiring where we do a clockwise J hook around the screw terminal now the clockwise J hook is correct and that is best practice and the most common way to wire an outlet would I do not agree with there's two kind of points here this is called speed wiring or backstabbing it's only available for residential grade outlets and only available when you use 14 gauge wire on a 15 amp circuit such as this application I do not recommend backstabbing in many professionals do not recommend this it's a one and done feature you could put a small flathead screwdriver in here and release that wire but that is it you cannot use that feature again and why I don't like that if we look internally to what's going on I actually have two wires here that are running into the speed wiring feature and then you can see how they're being held there's actually just one little tab here that presses against the wire when it comes into the housing and that's it it kind of bites into your copper but once that tab is deflected it's deflected it's really not a very good spring where it could bounce back and that's why if you press that Tab out of the way it releases that wire but that is also why it's one and done because that tab would deflect and it would not be ideal to be used again so mistake number two is using backstabbing to wire your outlet additionally I said there was another point and that is I prefer commercial grade Outlet this is my favorite Le Grand it's a 15 amp Le Grand commercial grade Outlet you're going to pay about a dollar fifty or two dollars more as compared to your residential grade but I think it's worth every penny now overall commercial grade Outlets are just built better they're higher standards better build quality thicker gauge materials but also they have this feature called back wiring this is not backstabbing it could look very similar where you put that wire straight in and you tighten down your screw terminal but what this does it actually pulls a plate on the back side and it pinches down that wire internally so it's not depending on any sort of lever arm pressing against it but here on this commercial grade you can see how that wire is pinched in the plate as we tighten down the screw terminal and these are reusable right so if I needed to rewire I'm doing some type of service I can easily unscrew that take the wire out the wire is not damaged can be reused and I can use that back wiring feature again so mistake number two using back wiring but I also would recommend using the commercial grade Outlets over residential on any of your projects now the third mistake goes to kind of this jumbled up mess you see here bringing all your wires into the outlet itself and kind of serving as a junction why I do not like this one is this failure mode that we saw we had a failure at the power coming in which was actually on the screw terminal itself because we didn't have continuity on that power coming in it knocked out the other two pieces of Romex that were going to other outlets Downstream on the same circuit so it takes everything out one failure point at one Outlet take takes out the entire circuit that does not have to happen if you use a technique called pigtailing now let me demonstrate the other advantage of pigtailing by trying to get this type of configuration back into the electrical box so you're going to have to kind of fold those back in where you're actually trying to press this back into the box where you can thread in your mounting screws so if you don't use pigtailing you just run all the wires in one you're going to have a hard time getting this Outlet flush you're going to be having to push it all over the place so it's actually lined up flush once you put that face plate on two it's going to push wires all over the place so if you made mistake number one and you did not secure down those unused screw terminals you do have an opportunity of a short as a wire is pushed over in contact with that screw terminal so there's just a better way and let me show you how I would wire up a commercial grade Outlet so I'll strip down these three sets of Romex and the amount that I'm stripping off corresponds to my preferred wire connector and that is a Wago 221 lever nut I think these are superior to wire nuts and are ideal for Di wires or even professionals so while I start to wire these up don't forget below the video you'll see a link to our Amazon store I have all sorts of different sections broken out but specifically the electrical section will show you a few options for Wagga lever nuts the 78 piece is the most common by far and for that price you get two wire three wire and five wire that will fit all of your different needs around the house and one feature right here is you can actually see your wires and that they are firmly connected to the bus bar now here are the actual pigtails so you can see I have one lever still open that's where I'll connect the hot the neutral and the ground pigtail and here's the big difference right so if something got knocked out on the outlet if the outlet failed we still have everything tied together at the Wago lavernette so it won't take out our other outlets and won't affect the other parts of the circuit and now I have three wires coming to my outlet I can do a J hook here for my my one ground which I'll connect first in a clockwise Direction and then as you saw I'm just going to go straight in because this is commercial grade and I'm using back wiring now with three wires this will be much easier to get into the electrical box and then mistake number four which you probably already caught is why are we using 15 amp Breakers and 14 gauge wire for our Outlets I highly recommend for your outlet to use 20 amp Breakers and then the corresponding 12 gauge wire this is just going to set you up give you a little bit more capacity and when you're running things like the space heater behind me which this homeowner was in addition to a vacuum those are two high current draw appliances you want that extra capacity for convenience and just to avoid any issues as always let me know what you guys think down in the comments and I really do appreciate your feedback now if that was a lot coming at you and you really aren't confident with your skills when it comes to doing your own electrical work around the house safely into code check out this video right here and it really is an ultimate beginner's guide I think it's a great place to start we're going to go through basic tools we're going to go through wiring outlets and give you some examples of different installations so thanks for joining me on this video and we'll catch you on that next one take care

Channel: Everyday Home Repairs

Views: 70,332

Keywords: poorly built, poorly built new homes, electrical wiring best practices, DIY electrical, diy electrical wiring residential, everyday home repairs

Id: St4T-ntiRw4

Length: 9min 41sec (581 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 08 2022