Circuit Breaker and Electrical Panel Basics

so we have a lot of different electrical videos on the channel but today i want to give you the basics of your electrical panel this is one of the parts of your home it's really good to have some basic understanding and that is independent whether or not you want to do any upgrades or if you actually want to work on the panel it's just good knowledge to know so we'll start off from the outside pointing out a few of the features and how to identify some of the basic specifications for your panel then we'll take the cover off looking internally at some of those components and then we'll finish off with a few of the different issues that i've had come up in home inspections so you can take a look and proactively get ahead of that just in case you're wanting to buy or sell a house in the future all right now looking from the outside we have our overall cover in the access door you're probably familiar with this because if you ever had a circuit breaker trip you'd have to open the door and reset your breaker now both on the outside of the door somewhere on the cover itself you probably have the brand of electrical panel which would be the same as the brand of the circuit breakers you're using the four main ones that usually you can get readily available if you ever have to swap out a circuit breaker or do any maintenance is square d this one is a square d and at least in our area is the most common brand then you have ge eaton and siemens those are kind of your four most common but depending on the age depending on your area there could be other brands as well so you have all your different breakers but let's start off with the main breaker here on the bottom is my main breaker and on the switch itself you'll see a small label it either probably has 200 100 or possibly even 60. that is the overall amperage or the amount of current that can go through that breaker before it would trip so this is a 200 amp service which matches my electrical meter installed on the house now mine is on the low side and that is because in this community underground utilities are ran so it comes up from the bottom most of the time you'll actually have lines coming from a transformer on a pole over to a mast on your house and then down so your main is probably up top so then you'll find the labels for your breakers now i think it goes without saying these can be way off so when your electrical surface was first installed hopefully everything was labeled correctly but depending on how much maintenance and who did the work over time these can start to really change so never trust that whatever this says let's say living room and you hit the living room circuit and then you go start to swap out that outlet not so fast you would always want to test that outlet this would hopefully give you the direction of which breaker to hit but it is by no means 100 accurate and to be honest usually there is quite a few errors on these so the only other thing i'll know before we take the cover off and start looking at the internals you'll see that you'll have these smaller circuit breakers which again will be labeled on the switch either 15 or 20 which means 15 amp or 20 amp and again that is going to mean that that circuit has a maximum delivered amperage of either 15 or 20 for a 120 volt circuit then you'll have the thicker breakers that are the thickness of two of these singles that just means that that is going to provide power to a 240 volt circuit that commonly would be a dryer maybe a stove an air conditioning unit and it is going to be the amperage for which is labeled on the switch often 30 40 60 amps depending on what appliance it's actually feeding power to all right now i will remove these bolts usually there is six pan head bolts or screws that you need to remove but just be careful you'll remove either four or five of those and then make sure you have a good hold on the cover before you remove the last one because that cover is going to come right off and you wouldn't want the edge of a cover to go inside the electrical panel because that could create a short and be a very serious situation now i do want to take this time it probably goes without saying the dividing line often between diy and doing electrical in your house and culling in the pros is right here often people do not feel comfortable really going into their electrical panel and that might be a really good guideline for you to follow now if you feel comfortable with your skills it's your own house you've checked your local code and you can do the work for instance i have four open slots here where i could be expanding maybe i want to add something to my garage which is a project that's coming up on the channel so make sure you're working safely and you are comfortable if you're wanting to work inside the electrical panel all right so depending on who did the install for you this might be a rat's nest or might be nicely routed and have a lot of rhyme or reason where things are going and mine might be kind of inverse to what you are looking at i have most my circuits most my romex coming from the top side and i have my main conductors coming from my meter coming from the bottom side so here is the main breaker let's take a closer look i'll show you what's going on all right for right now you can kind of block out all the wires on the side you're just going to focus on the main wires coming from your meter and then that's what's providing all the power through your main 200 amp breaker or whatever amp breaker you have you have a 120 hot coming on the right hand side a 120 hot coming on the left hand side so this one will power the bus bar that goes up through all the circuit breakers on the left hand side and this will provide 120 running the right hand side then you'll have your neutral coming in the middle here and there's actually a bus bar that then will go out to all those screw terminals that you see on the left and right hand side so remember even if you hit the main to off the wires coming in are still hot both on the left and right hand side so just always take caution when you have the cover off your panel so we did have one circuit down here that was added later on so this serves as a good example where you run the romex to your panel you would cut the outside insulation off then you'd have your black hot your white neutral and then your bare copper ground and all those individual wires would then branch to the outside and then go to their independent location the white in this instance runs all the way up to this top breaker here and that is because this is a specific type of breaker called an arc fault where you would have the neutral coming to the breaker for all these other breakers that are not extended back they are not arc fault or they're not gfci so the only wires that you'll see coming to these breakers are just your black hots and then your white neutral wires would be then just ran to these screw terminals so only in the instance of the afci or gfci would you have your neutrals going all the way up to your breakers and also depending on how new your panel is there are some different instances where you don't have to run these independent what are called pigtails connecting down to the screw terminals here so there might be a little bit more elegant insulation if you have a newer panel so one of the most common things a homeowner might do is if you have an issue with a breaker always tripping you might just want to replace this 120 volt square d 20 amp breaker pretty easy all you need to do is you would hit your main power turn that off and then that would turn off power to this entire bus bar you could undo your screw terminal here to get your hot wire off of this breaker and then really all that's going on here is there's a mounting clip in the front and then this clip that actually connects the breaker to the bus bar so even though these both look like they might be connected to power they're not this is just a front mounting clip so once you have the wire off here you can just pull the breaker out and then you'd actually take that down to your home improvement store so you have the example and you can match up the exact breaker because it's not uncommon to have a few different designs even for the same brand if you know you have square d and then what is actually going on inside of these breakers so if you look inside so like i said this is just a mounting clip so that can actually come out and then you have your terminal that the wire would go into which would then go out to your romex that is connected up to this braided copper wire internally and then there's this strip strip here which is actually the main functional piece to the breaker now i'm not going to show you this in action but i will link a video in the description which will show the internals opened up when a short would happen what actually happens internally so you can dive deeper if you'd like but then that braided wire comes over to this contact point but in this state the breaker is open because this contact is not connected up so once it's flipped on so if we turn that on then you can see those contacts are together so as it stands now in the on position you would bring the 120 from the bus bar through this wire internally out the screen terminal and then to your circuit then if a load ever exceeds in this case 20 amps it would heat up this portion and trip the breaker and then that's what would trip your breaker and cut power to that circuit so that is what the internals look like and again if you want to see a full down look down in the description i'll i'll send you over to another video that shows a great example of this actually tripping now when it comes to inspections things that have tripped me up in the past in the past you would have some of these knockouts with romex just coming up through but then you'd have no cable clamp or nothing protecting the romex against the sharp edge of the box so that can be called out in an inspection because it is a dangerous situation that can cut into the insulation of your hot and create a short if your panel is completely full you will want to take off the cover and see if you have one hot wire going to each of your circuits often if it's a full panel you might see two going into each circuit and i know i've been called out in the past as that is not allowed at least within my area and then the last common ones come up in my inspections is these knockouts so if you do not have a breaker in place but someone has popped that knockout out then you have an opening and a safety hazard where somebody could actually put their fingers or something within the panel and cause a short if it is removed and you need to patch the hole you can get filler plates at pretty much any home improvement source so it's not a big deal and actually it's one of the easiest fixes if that comes up in an inspection so hopefully that information gets you a little more comfortable with your electrical panel in your circuit breakers just good information to know as an educated homeowner now if you have any questions or additional comments jump down below the video let me know what you're thinking i always like to get you guys this feedback now if you guys want to continue on your electrical knowledge journey check out this video right here it'll show you some common mistakes seen and even new construction with almost 2 million views on that video it's been a really popular one and we've gotten a lot of good feedback so i appreciate you guys stopping by and we'll catch you on the next video take care

Channel: Everyday Home Repairs

Views: 389,645

Keywords: circuit breaker installation, electrical panel wiring, wiring basics for house

Id: bGZVILwbyLo

Length: 12min 25sec (745 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 07 2021