BIGGEST Mistakes DIYers Make When Connecting Wires Together | How To

hey y'all welcome back to the channel adam here and today i'm going to be showing you some of the biggest mistakes that i see diyers especially making when it comes to doing their own wiring and especially when it comes to making their connections between wires or their splicing of wires i'm going to show you the most common mistakes what they look like show you the ways that they should be done or more recommended ways of doing them so let's go ahead and jump right in so first i have two solid core wires that i want to splice together and this is probably the most common combination that there is you may from time to time have solid core to strand it however and i'll show you that in a little bit so the most common mistake that i see most diy-ers make is they'll take their two wires that they're going to be joining together they'll put them together and they'll just take a wire nut put it on top and then just tighten it down like so and then this is where one of the most debatable subjects come into play and i've seen mostly from diyers debating this but i've also seen some electricians debating it as well as far as is this good enough is it good enough just to put two wires together and then put a wing nut over the top of it and my answer is it depends and i'll get to that in just a moment but let's go to the code book and see what the code book says so according to the nec 110.3b it says that equipment that is listed labeled or both shall be installed and used in accordance with any instructions included in the listing or labeling so what they're basically saying is you are to follow the instructions or the recommendations of whatever is written on whatever product you are using so let's check out the packaging so no doubt many of you have seen this packaging ideal is one of the top producers of wire nuts so let's turn it over here to the back for the instructions and as you can see here they've got a diagram here as to how it should look and then they also have the instructions down here now when we get to the pre-twisting which is number three what it says is pre-twisting is acceptable but not required so to answer your question as far as code goes it is not required to pre-twist however this is still wrong in my opinion because we're supposed to look at the labeling and what does the label show it shows putting the wire nut on with the wires at the same length but over here it shows to where they twist it so much to where you can actually see the wiring underneath of the wire nut twisting because what that's going to do is it's going to guarantee that the wires underneath of the wire nut are also twisting but this is what i see the majority of the time there is no twisting underneath of the nut and it's just in there like this to where when you go to push this into the back of the box it's not hard for this to rotate even just a slight revolution over to the left and then all the wires can just fall out like that without hardly any pulling on them so if you are not going to pre-twist what needs to happen is they need to be at the same length and then twist that wire nut on and until you can get to where you can't twist it anymore keep going even further you want to start seeing it to start twisting down below the wire nut as well down in this area all right so as you can see this would be much more acceptable because now we know that we have a good connection underneath of the wire nut and we also know that while this is all intertangled here together it's much less likely to be able to be pulled out or vibrate out over time and as you can see underneath we have a nice joint there but this is not the way that i even recommend doing and this is not the way that the majority of electricians recommend splicing wires together the vast majority of electricians will tell you to do this to take your two wires and line them up with each other and then take a pair of linesman pliers and then you're just going to start by pre-twisting those wires together and now as you can see i've got a nice joint here then after those are twisted together you'll just take your linesman pliers and snip off the very top to make everything perfectly equal now that all that's together that's when they will take their wire nut and they will put it over the wires and then twist it down like so so we've got the nice braiding that's going on underneath of the wire nut again but the reason that a lot of them advise doing it this way is before you put the wire nut on you can see your joint you can see that you have a nice joint where the wiring is making nice contact with each other the wire nut itself is basically serving as an addition to the connection that's going on between these two wires and it's also containing the tops of the wires so that you can't get shocked and also so that there's no ground faults like if you were using a metal box or something like that but you'll see when i take the wire nut off the wires still stay together they don't come apart and so you really have very very little to no risk of there being any issues with these two losing connection or arcing all right so now let's talk about connecting a solid core wire to a stranded wire so first i need to cut some of the insulation off of my wire if you take your wire strippers and if you look at your wire strippers you'll see where it says solid and it also says over here on the other side it says stranded that means that these are the numbers you want to follow for stranded these are what you want to follow for solid this is 14 gauge so we want to put it underneath of that number 14 on the stranded side so just put it underneath of there take off about three quarters of an inch and there's our stranded wire all right so again very similar to the solid core to solid core what people will do is they'll just take their stranded put it up next to their solid core take their wire nut put underneath of the wire nut and just spin it on all right so one thing that happens a lot of times when you do it this way and you just put them up next to each other is if you look underneath of this wire nut you can see that the stranded wire actually dropped down from the solid core wire so we know that the solid core wire is seated higher up in the wire nut than the stranded wire which could point to not having a very good connection here between the stranded wire and the solid core and also what can tend to happen especially using stranded wire is it's not going to hold as well in a wire nut it didn't take a whole lot of force to pull that out and as you can see in this particular case just like with the solid core when you don't turn it enough we barely got that stranded wire to start wrapping around this solid core wire but let's say that you did think that you did it right and you went ahead and you pre-twisted this and then you went and put your wire nut in on top and you really tighten you made sure that you tightened it down like so well what can still happen is it doesn't take a whole lot of force it'll take more but not a whole lot and out comes the stranded wire now as you can see it was starting to do a much better job of curling around that solid core wire so that connection probably would have been okay but it still was not curled nearly enough around that solid core wire and again a lot of it has to do with when they were put underneath of the wire nut you tried to put them up equally this stranded dropped down below so it did not seat up in the top of the wire nut well enough to really get a hold of it and bite into that stranded to really wrap it around the solid core wire and i see this most often on light fixtures because a lot of times your light fixtures come with your stranded wire and of course your romex that's running through your walls is always solid core so when i'm connecting a stranded wire to a solid core wire what i like to do is i like to make sure that i have a little bit more of my stranded wire exposed than my solid core wire and the reason for that is this is going to be doing the vast majority of the wrapping around this wire over here now i can see the argument a little bit more for not pre-twisting these as the wire nut as long as you get seated up in there is going to do a really good job of wrapping it around it however i still recommend pre-twisting the solid core and the stranded together and one thing to note is you do want to make sure not to tighten down too much when you're pre twisting on the stranded because what can happen is these stranded wires are kind of flimsy and they could be easy to break off and therefore you would make your wiring a little bit weaker just going to clean it up a little bit and so as you can see there's a nice bond between the strands and the solid core the strands are completely encompassing the solid core wire but i still definitely want to add my wire nut on so i'll just take my wire nut push it all the way up into the top till it seats and then just really tighten these down and i really want to make sure that it's nice and tight i've got this nice curling going on down below and when i go to pull it out there's no pulling that out of that wire nut so i know i've got a nice connection underneath of it it's all seated nicely up in the spring that's in the top of these wire nuts which helps to hold everything together bite into the wiring and also it's conductive to help pass the power along also really quickly if you find this video be helpful and you're finding it's helping to splice up your life do me a big favor hit that thumbs up button right down below to let me know that it's being helpful for you and it also helps to spread out to other people so maybe it can help them as well i really appreciate it let's get back into it so there is another product that can be used aside from a wire nut that i can get behind especially when connecting solid core to stranded it kind of takes away the mystery again as to whether or not you're going to have a good connection and it kind of is dummy proof and that's this product right here this is a wego 2-2-1 and these are basically splicing devices where you put your wires into these holes right here you've got this lever right here that basically when it's up you can put your wiring in and flip it down holds the wiring into place and then on the bottom side right here this little piece of metal here this is then what makes the connection between this wire and this wire and of course they make bigger ones than this but for these in particular i do think that these are a fairly good option when trying to make a connection between a stranded and a solid core wire now there is a following for these where they've made it pretty clear that a lot of them believe that huegos are really the only way to go on all installations i personally can't get behind that i think that there's a different tool for a different job and if you guys would like for me to make a video comparing this to say they've also got these push connections that you just push the wiring into or of course also wire nuts if you guys would like for me to make a video comparing all of these and showing what installations i think that they all work best in leave a comment down in the comment section and i'll be sure to make that let me get my wiring what i want to do is i want to strip off maybe about a half an inch off of each of these i just kind of like to twist the strands on these together just to make them stronger all right so now i've got my solid core here i've got my stranded here and i've got my way go so what i'm going to do is i'm going to pick up on both of these levers on the way go so they're in the upright position i'm going to take my solid core first it really doesn't matter which one first push it all the way in until it's seated you can turn it up on the opposite side and you can see that my lead is clearly all the way through touching that metal so now what i can do is i can just clamp down on it by putting that lever down on where the wire is and if i give it a good pull as you can see it's not going to come out so now i've still got my other lever that's up so i'll take my stranded wire and then put it up into the other hole underneath of that lever i like to always flip them over to make sure that they're seated correctly they're all the way up and then here at the bottom you can see that there's no insulation up underneath of the metal so we know we're going to have a good connection so now that they're seated correctly i'll just flip down that lever and as you can see they aren't coming out of there at all so super simple device they certainly have their place again i'll have links down in the description down below where you can pick these up along with all the other products that i have shown you in this video to make your splices so while i hope this video was really helpful for you i'm going to put some links right over here of some other electrical projects that i've done in the past feel free to check those out and if this video was helpful for you please let me know by giving the video a thumbs up and of course if you have any questions or comments at all leave those down in the comments down below and i'll catch you all in the next one

Channel: How To Home

Views: 3,001,657

Keywords: do it yourself, connect electrical wires, proper joint of electric wire, electric wire joint, diy electrical wiring residential, wires connecting method, electric wire connection, diy electrical wiring, electric wire joint connector, how to use wire nuts to connect wires, how to use wire nuts with stranded wire, how to use wire nuts properly, wago 221 connectors how to use, wago 221 vs wire nuts, wago 221 lever-nuts, how to connect stranded wire to solid wire

Id: WschUxip-4w

Length: 13min 7sec (787 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 23 2022