Different Types of Electrical Boxes

[Music] all right hey what's up guys riley here from becoming an electrician.com in this video i want to talk about different residential boxes that you may be seeing in a home or in a condo setting now i think i have pretty much most boxes that you generally see um and i just want to cover each one just nice and quick in this video okay so before we get into the video definitely check out my free book i have for you guys by going to becoming an electrician dot com forward slash subscribe and you can enter in your name and email and i'll send you the book for free okay so there is some boxes here which are commercial boxes and essentially the difference between commercial and residential boxes is there really isn't a difference except it's just kind of use case so for example if you are going to be you know bending pipe or something and you only need to pull a couple a couple wires you might use a shallow 4x4 for example but if you want to be using this in a residential setting it's kind of annoying because now you you know now you need certain connectors and now you need more parts where something like this which is like your basic you know uh plastic box single gang plastic box here's our these are your connectors essentially right whereas something like this you have to knock it out you know so all right so i'll just quickly cover uh some of these commercial boxes just just to get them out of the way but then i want to cover the residential boxes okay so again this is a shallow 4x4 all right so again you would be using this if you don't have very many wires to run this is a deep this is probably your most common kind of 4x4 like when you have you know quite a few wires um you do something like this i don't have a 6x6 a 6x6 is uh those gray boxes they're kind of smaller those are also very common if you have to run quite a few wires okay so those are 4x4 boxes i'll quickly cover this one so this is a range box or an oven box or a dryer box it's what we call a 4 and 11 16 box these are a special item and they're actually quite expensive so do not be using these boxes on a job site if it's not for an oven you know range or dryer because they are expensive the reason why they're expensive is because these companies know that homeowners need them and that's why they make them so expensive okay so do not be using these as a junction box be using those other four by fours or even a six by six one little pro tip i learned about the oven you know for example so uh an oven and a range you know i usually just call it just like a an oven but usually people call it a range right which is um i believe it's your oven as well as a cooktop but when you actually have your plug l is for laundry when it comes to the plug all right so someone taught me that l is for laundry okay whereas the other one is the 40 amp plug for your oven and they are straight whereas when you plug in the other one it has a little l shape and an l for laundry for that 30 amp plug okay so again that was a 4 and 11 16. do not be using it for normal splicing all right so i'll just quickly go through these octagons now in a commercial setting depending on if you are um putting boxes onto a stud many times these have a strap on them okay and the strap is really awesome because it makes it really easy to mount it makes it really secure these are you know a strapless and you got to put your screw through these and sometimes the screw doesn't go in very good and these things are all loose so these typically you want to be using them like let's say on concrete you would take your sharpie and you would uh you know you'd mark it and then let's see if it yeah i have a little mark on my hand but so that's what you do you know you'd have your mark there you will mark mark that's for your sharpie you pull it out you make your hammer drill you put your blue inserts or whatever inserts you have i don't like the blue inserts they don't hold very good check out what's called alex anchors alex aluminum expansion anchors so again this is more of like a commercial setting box okay same thing here so you know if we're gonna be bending pipe and if you want to maybe put a light on here that's what maybe you'd use this for now if you need more wires to go through this is a deep octagon all right okay so i just want to get rid of the metal boxes so um now i actually purchased the wrong one this one is for a bx armored cable so for example this is armored cable right so you can see that these connectors are for an armored cable right here and make sure you're always using an anti-short with these through those little red things that kind of just go in to you know so that you don't wreck the wire so anyway so this is for you know essentially this is like metal wire or you can uh you know take these off and it gives you more room in your box you can use it for uh pipe or if you need to put like a 90 on there but many times you know it's all about doing things as cheap as possible so essentially you would just take this knockout out loosen this you can put the wire in there with the uh with your anti-short but again um sometimes they sell these and it's for uh your residential wire your nmd wire you know wire like this right this is like your typical standard you know 14 2 house wire and sometimes metal boxes have a different style of clamp which can clamp down on these on this wire but make sure that you are not clamping it down too tight because you can pinch the wire okay all right so now i just want to cover residential boxes okay so these are your most common type of residential boxes for light switches plugs okay stuff like that um one has big ears one has small ears i really don't think there's any difference out there no one has ever kind of told me there's really a difference um i've always kind of like these ones sometimes you can kind of cut them if you need to um you know like if it doesn't fit but uh yeah one thing i want to say is usually i don't like using nails so sometimes you work with a certain company and like they try to cheap out and they use nails instead of screws i always like to use like 8x1 screws they're just they just hold better nails typically will always kind of loosen eventually one other thing you can also do with these is sometimes we got to break the tabs off so you can either use your pliers and you can break them you can also put it on a stud so for example if this was the stud you just put it like this and you can actually just hit it boom like nice and hard and these tabs will break off for you so why you would want to break off the tabs is because when you're on a job site so in a residential setting it's not as big of an issue but when you are in a commercial setting you always got to be looking at the prints right so again you guys can visit the website and you guys can check my search bar or whatever i have a category there for prints i talk to you about architecturals and uh just different types of prints that you should be looking at one of them is all about drywall depth right so you never want to have your your box sticking out of the wall okay so if you're so imagine this is the wall it's okay to have your box behind the wall because you can put inserts in or whatever to meet code but if your box is sticking out of the wall like this so again imagine my hand is the wall and the box is sticking out like this much i'm telling you it is the worst to try to fix so um but anyway so this is just a single gang box plastic they're really awesome because uh first of all it's not metallic which means that if your plug ever does touch it it doesn't short out like uh you know for example like a device box many times if we have a plug you can tape around the plugs so that it doesn't short out you know that's like the worst kind of maintenance call so plastic awesome for that way you just use these so only one wire goes in each one and then you just bond it right so again this is bonding not grounding and then you have your just your single device okay so that is a single gang box now uh in recent years um we have seen these okay and uh so this is like uh your your your outside plugs for your uh for your vapor barrier and then when they're insulating they will put their poly all across here back in the day we used to use a vapor boot which you can see right here so uh again i'm not sure if if these are still cold or whatever i know that before i stopped being electrician these were coming in these are awesome because these were these were so annoying to use and so just quickly i'll show you so how it worked for a single gang box again you only use these on outside walls and uh sort of just like that okay but nowadays you can see that they just have a vapor box like this and they're just so awesome i guess we used to call them foam boxes another reason why these are so awesome is you could also cut the ears off of them and um if you ever needed to cut a hole in the wall and stick it through so again you cut the ear off and you can slide it through and you can screw right into here so it was just like it became a really versatile box on the job site that when i first started it wasn't around so again those are for your outside walls okay all right so let's just talk about a double gang so this is just like the single gang except now you have two devices so you can have a switch and a plug or two switches or two plugs um all right and so with these you can just screw them on usually it's nice to put uh you know your two screws in here too so that it doesn't kind of bend it's a nice secure box so you can put your screw put a screw down here uh but then usually you know you want to put two screws in there as well it's a nice secure hold and then again with the nmd wire you know it just slides right into here holds it super good i really really liked you know using these plastic boxes and same thing so back in the day we used to use one of these if it was on an outside wall right for that vapor barrier but also these can also be a foam box as well and again you just want to use the foam boxes or these on the outside wall the foam box is because they are more expensive right so these are for the inside walls where they're more affordable all right so this is a three gang plastic box and what you need to know about a three gang is that you have to support the other side now so as soon as you get to three gang or bigger you're going to have to start putting a piece of wood that is the same size as the wall so you can see that this this piece of wood's really small but imagine it's a two by four wall you have to be using a two by four or if it's a two by six so you put your screw in here in here and here and in here all right so four screws on this side and then you put two screws boom boom and then you got a nice secure hold okay so that is a code rule uh for my understanding um again if it's a two by four wall it's got to be a two by four if it's a two by six wall so whatever the length you know the the width of the wall it's got to be that for that support and that is three gang or bigger okay all right so now i just want to talk to you about uh an octagon so an octagon is for a light okay so you got to make sure that an octagon is for a light because it's round and typically a light cover covers this nice and clean okay never use a 4x4 for a light if you do uh you will have holes around there like i'll show you a picture i saw on a job site someone did a smoke detector it looks so bad but yeah so that's what this is for the biggest thing with lights again is the drywall depth and again if you look at your prints your prints will always tell you especially on a commercial job site if there's two layers of drywall if there's three layers of drywall it'll also tell you how thick that drywall is right so for example is it like um two layers of half inch and one layer 5 8 or is it like a layer of plywood and 5 8 or whatever so again if this is my hand you never want to have the box outside of the wall you always want to have it at least behind the wall if it's behind the wall you're way safer again then you can use an insert to meet code you obviously want to try to be flush that's always the goal but if you had a choice to screw up you want to be in the wall rather than outside of the wall again the same thing applies here that um you can break the tabs off again i would just put this up to like a stud just like this and then you hit it right here with your pliers and it just snaps off right you can also twist them off too but i usually find it's just a one hit deal usually they both break and you just turn it over just give it a nice little whack there too and the tabs break off and it allows you to get your depths okay so if i show you here um i think back in the day they used to show the actual drywall depths but you can see here right so again always use your tape measure to measure um you know the depths so you can see where my thumb is this is half inch when we get up to that other line right here you know one inch so you know sometimes you got to put it all the way down and you know um so again always look at your prints and it will tell you how thick is the drywall but so an octagon box we're using it for a light essentially again it has the plastic inserts which is awesome for nmd lumex you know home wire now let's move on to this one here all right so this box here is a pretty common residential box um you just kind of put it up to the stud you can hit it these kind of insert into the stud into the wood wooden stud and then you just put your two you know two screws in up top two screws at the bottom it's a pretty nice tight uh fit but honestly i always try to avoid metal boxes in a residential setting the plastic boxes are just like way easier more enjoyable to use uh but you can see that these uh connectors are like what you know supports that when you strap down the wire these can actually do residential wire okay so you can just open up the tab you can slide it in and you can actually tighten these down on nmd but again just be careful because if you're using your drill you can really tighten down but again i just want to show you that you can see that this one here this is for armored cable only whereas here you can see that this can all can actually be for lumex or nmd wire all right so again i usually don't recommend using these in like a residential setting all right so i'm just going to move on to this one right here so this is like a device box it's called an 11 10 it's probably one of the most common boxes that we honestly use as like an electrician when it comes to like in maintenance rooms if we have to just do like a plug we just kind of pipe into it we just have a plug or a switch or something one thing to know about these is again um when you are installing your plug you can uh really short out easy and you just want to make sure that if you are in inserting uh pipes or connectors you know i always typically try to think about um where i'm going to place them like you know if you if you have like right here maybe it can kind of be hard on like the plug or whatever so kind of like uh where you're entering the box i always think about that same here with the bond uh you know for example if i had to pipe it maybe i would do it like this the pipe would come into the bottom that way i can come up and bond nice and easy whereas if it was like this you know it's just kind of annoying you have a connector there might be hard to get like the lock ring in et cetera et cetera so always just kind of think ahead that way be way easier just to have like a free area if you want to put your connector on and if nothing's up top then you're good to go so again this is called an 11 10 that's what i've always heard it oh there you go 11 10 right there that's where they get it okay i'm not sure like what they actually call it i just always hear of like the the names on the job site when you know kind of like if someone would say go get an 11 10 right i want to talk about this box right here so this is called an easy box this is most commonly known for if you're going to be doing a renovation and you just want to add a plug into the wall however we very commonly use an easy box if we are installing a plug into an island so for example like in your kitchen if you have an island or a peninsula that a plug is on like the very very end right so you know so sometimes many times these are in there these things are pretty annoying to work with especially when you uh put a gfi in here you know gfis are big they are getting a little smaller which is cool but still like you know these things are a little bit annoying and uh your wire placement and how you wrap your wires around you really got to think about that all right so just a little rundown on how an easy box works okay so the first thing to know is that it is the size of a credit card or like a bank card or any type of card that's typically what we would use to trace out and then you can cut it and then this would go right in okay so how it works is you can see that the screws are loose and you just push down okay you can see that this allows it to slide into that hole okay because they're loose now you should be getting your wire in here if you want to prepare it okay then you can enter it into the box you push down push up so now that now that your wire is in there you can now tighten it down which will tighten down on your wire be careful don't crank it down these things strip a lot all right so don't don't don't strip it it's not worth it okay so you want to be half decent tight but i'm telling you that they strip easy and but you want to tighten both of them down and that will lock it into place which means that these ears now we can tighten this so for example imagine uh this is the cabinet or something so for example it goes into the cabinet slid in we open it up now we would tighten the screws down and it would lock into the cabinet all right or you know wherever you're installing this and that's an easy box okay so again typically we are using them in renovations but uh very often we're using them in um in condos when it comes to island plugs and peninsula plugs and stuff like that all right these are also not cheap they're pretty expensive and the reason they're expensive is because they know that homeowners many times need to do a renovation to add a plug right okay so the last box i have here is called a pancake box now one thing for you guys to know about these is that you're only allowed uh one wire in them okay so you can you can have a 14 3 in here for a smoke detector um but you're only allowed one wire you know and then obviously like you're allowed like the one splice like if you're gonna put a light in here or something like that but you're only allowed i believe one wire in a pancake box again if this is um on like in the ceiling you know like on the very very top floor where you need the vapor barrier again you're gonna have to put poly around here or something like that uh so that it's vapor barrier and uh that's it okay so that's all the boxes that we went through so a bit of a longer video hopefully you guys learned some stuff there's a lot of information in there um but typically those were the boxes i've seen a lot on a job site again when it comes to a commercial setting very often when it came to like a 4x4 the one with the straps are just like way more enjoyable to use you know because it has a strap you wrap it around you fold it around you put your screws in you get a really really nice you know secure box if you're going to install these onto a stud just as is it's always kind of hard to get it lined up flush on the stud and then you know a lot of times it's hard to get them tight but that's it so if you guys got questions you guys can leave comments below or if you have any suggestions for upcoming videos again like i said i want to get into some kind of math stuff with you guys soon uh but i already wrote this article on the website about you know different residential uh electrical boxes so again check out the website there's lots of articles lots of details and hey leave a comment leave a comment on the website i'd appreciate that i will reply to you guys so again if you guys want to stay updated with the website you guys can download my free book for apprentice electricians just go to becoming an electrician dot com forward slash subscribe if you want to get new videos you can subscribe here on youtube thanks for checking out the video and i'll talk to you in the next one

Channel: BecomingAnElectrician

Views: 42,341

Keywords: Apprentice Electrician, Electrician, Electricity, Residential Electrician, Commercial Electrician, Single Gang Box, Plastic Single Gang Box, Double Gang Box, Octagon Box, Pancake Box, EZ Box, Device Box, Renovation Box, Electrical Boxes, 1110 Box, Metal Electrical Box

Id: oLl8l1dNNgo

Length: 20min 34sec (1234 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 18 2022