Electrical Inspection Basics with InterNACHI Training Partner Chicagoland Home Inspectors

unmuting the microphone but i guess it does happen so we're going to talk about electrical basics today um we're going to start off with definitions and the first one is going to be conductors all right conductors is going to be anything that's going to allow electricity to flow um so basically any type of metals any dirty water um human beings we're all conductors all right the most common conductors we're going to see in residential construction is going to be the wiring that we use um it's also going to be plumbing pipes as well because we're when we talk about grounding and why we ground and how we ground excuse me that's all going to come into play there so the most common ones we're going to run into in residential electric is going to be copper pretty much um other ones that we will see doing an inspection is going to be the aluminum and then sometimes we'll run into some tin as well all right i'd like to address a little bit about these so aluminum and tin a lot of people get confused between the two of them now they're both going to be silverish in color when it comes to you know looking at the actual metal portion of it um aluminum will be a little bit shinier and newer and i know i have a picture of it here um when we get later on into the slides but the biggest detail and the easiest way to tell the difference is going to be that aluminum is always going to have the plastic insulation when we're dealing with branch circuit wiring i'm not aware of any aluminum wire that was made with the cloth jacket on it everything that was made with the cloth jacketed um material that was going to be 10. now when i say 10 that was actually copper what we're talking about is tin cladding so it's going to be tin cladded copper is what we're going to refer to it as aluminum and residential wiring that was used around the mid 60s to the mid 70s if you don't know that already you are going to want to write that down so again it's the mid 60s to mid 70s um it's going to have plastic installation and single strand wiring really isn't allowed anymore so the reason is there was something called aluminum creep when it got warm the aluminum wire would expand and then when it cooled off it would shrink so the more it got used the bigger it got the smaller it got um that actually loosened up a lot of wires or a lot of the screws that held the wires together so because of which there were fires that happen in homes and the fire investigations during their cause and origin have determined that it was because of the aluminum wiring that was in the house they brought that to underwriters laboratory um and a few other places where they did the testing and then they started making changes and they're not allowing single stranded aluminum or solid aluminum to be installed in any sort of houses now here in the state of illinois it should be known that we do have mandatory defects that we have to report to our clients one of those and there's only five of them but one of those five is solid aluminum branch circuits all right um so let's talk about that a little bit the difference between solid and stranded is you know to me it's kind of simple it's if it's one solid piece of wire that's coming in there or a single strand of wire that's coming in there then it's a solid wire if there's a whole bunch of strands that are in the wire and they're twisted together and then that's covered with the plastic insulation that's stranded wire all right the difference between a feeder wire and a branch circuit uh feeder wires are going to be coming from either the pole to the panel uh they'll go from a panel to another panel those are feeder wires those by definition can actually be solid aluminum but because of the flow of electricity i don't think i've ever seen that much we just can't get that much electrical flow that we're going to need in a house for those connections in a single strand so solid aluminum we talked about if it has the plastic insulation solid as opposed to stranded and branch as opposed to feeder you should be able to identify those so when we talk about the flow of electricity on these things there's another term i'd like you to be aware of called skin effect now it's not a foolproof 100 deal but it's still a good way to think about it when we talk about water flowing in pipes water flows inside the pipe when we talk about electricity flowing on wires they actually flow on the outside of the wire so they flow on the skin so knowing that term skin effect says that if i have one one wire then it's only the surface area of that wire where the electricity is going to flow if i have a stranded wire i have a whole bunch of surface areas and that's going to allow electricity to flow easier a nice analogy i like to use is the difference between melting ice if i have a hundred pounds of crushed ice that's gonna melt faster than a hundred pounds of a solid block of ice because again ice melts on the surface so if there's more surface area with the crushed ice then that's going to melt faster than the black device same thing electricity is going to flow easier on stranded wire then it is going to be flowing on solid wire and that's because of the skin effect so the speed of everything um the speed of everything in in the conductors the easiest flow of electricity i think is the tin um right behind it almost a hundred percent of it is gonna be the copper so they're gonna be nose and nose and tin would go just a little bit faster and the last one is gonna end up being um aluminum i kind of like to refer to that as the horse race and that's going to end up being beetle bomb and coming in at last so what does that mean some of what we have to do i'm going to zoom in on that board a little bit sorry okay some of what we do is check wire sizes for and make sure we have the right size breakers that protect these things so i know in the nec they have a pretty extensive layout on the what size wires what size breakers the distance that come comes into play the temperatures that come into play but for the most part uh for us it's pretty standard all right so i like to encourage people to make a chart you know and the first thing we should be doing is three different columns the first column is going to be amps and then we're going to put up here copper and then aluminum okay and now the ants are going to be pretty much our breaker sizes when we deal with this so the most common breakers we're going to run into are 15 20 30 we're going to jump up to 50. 60 100 and 200 so then if we draw a line coming across with these we'll be able to write down what size gauge wire or bigger what size gauge wire should be on these breakers all right so if i had a 15 amp breaker i should expect to see a 14 gauge wire if it was copper i should also expect to see a 12 gauge wire if it was aluminum remember we said electricity has a little less it flows slower on the aluminum than what it does on the copper so we're going to need a bigger wire more surface area to allow that electricity to flow 20 amps 12 aluminum 10 copper uh 30 amps is going to be 10 and then this is gonna be eight 50 amps is going to be eight and then six hopefully you're seeing a little bit of a pattern here you know as we go down into the wire size 60 amps is 60 aluminum is gonna be a four and a hundred amps copper is a four but i like to put that off to the side in the chicago land area we're actually gonna normally see a three so i just and it's not going to be in any tests or anything like that but if you're gonna operate in the chicagoland area i'd like you to know number three and chicago number two aluminum this is a one of our more common feeder wires that we're going to see in residential electricity when we deal with the 100 amp services and the last one we don't follow this scale we kind of flip it around a little bit we go two and four and then what we're gonna do is put a slash zero after the end of that and that slash zero uh stand the zero stands for ought so it's you know if it's one zero it's one op two off three out four r once we get bigger than four on then you start getting into mcm and just bigger electricity that we're not gonna deal with all right so another term is cladding that's up there all right and cladding is basically when we put the when we put an object around another object in other words if i have vinyl cladded windows that means i'm putting vinyl wrapped around a wood window all right so we actually run into stuff like tin clad copper which i had up on the screen before that means the actual wire itself is copper but it's got a coating of tin on the outside and since most of the electricity if not all of the electricity is going to flow on that tin that's what we're going to be measuring as it as the wire and the wire gauges that we're going to be using one that's kind of unusual is something called copper cladded aluminum and i shouldn't say that it's unusual it's a very common way that we run into it and quite frankly i don't think anybody's going to really recognize it unless they cut the end of the wire and peek up in there or they're able to read the writing that's on the insulation itself all right but in this case we have a aluminum wire that's cladded with copper as it comes in there so i i always like to ask a little bit of a test question um whenever i'm doing these classes and i know we really can't answer them right here so i'm going to end up giving you the answer if i had a 10 or let's say 100 feet wire two of them one of them was a solid copper wire we're going to say it's a 14 gauge solid copper wire 100 feet long and then right next to it i had another 100 foot long copper cladded aluminum wire same size they're both 14 gauge they're both the same distance they both have 120 volts pushing the electricity to them they have the same amount of draw at the other end so i always try to ask the question which one is the electricity going to travel the fastest on is it going to be the copper cladded aluminum or is it going to be the solid copper wire and i usually get a mix of both but if you're taking a into account that skin effect they're both going to be the same or at least they should be the same when we come with it this chart up here i'd like to encourage you to write it down and memorize it every home inspection that we do we're going to look at the breakers we're going to match them up with the wire sizes and make sure we have the right size breaker you know many times we're going to see things that are over fused it's common all right so if i got a 14 gauge wire on a 20 amp breaker it's not designed to carry that let's see if i can switch these lights a little bit it's not designed to carry that as much and when that happens you know that's considered over fusing now in all reality and and i know i'm recording this so i guess i can't deny it i really don't see that as a big deal if i got a 14 gauge wire on a 20 amp circuit it's wrong i'm going to identify it as being wrong we're going to document it but you know fixing that has just put the right size breaker in there and most of them aren't that expensive so we're not going to get too much into it but if i got a 14 gauge wire on a 40 or 50 inch breaker now i'm really rolling the dice that breaker is going to allow 50 amps to travel through something that's really only designed to carry 15 amps and then i'm taking a big push on it so every inspection that we do we do want to check and make sure that we do have the right size breakers for the right size wires now the other way around really doesn't matter so if i had a 10 gauge wire on a 15 amp breaker i don't care i mean i'm just limiting the flow that's going to go through there but it's not like i'm creating any sort of hazards i'm not making the wire the weak link and that's what we want to avoid we don't want the wire to end up being the weak link all right insulators all right and i guess i should take in the you know account other conductors you know we have a lot of lead service feeds in in this uh area so led is a conductor and we use that you know for our grounding electro conductors our connections to those all right so insulators the most common one we're going to have is going to be plastic pretty much all copper is going to end up being plastic insulation the second one is going to be cloth and that's going to be our key identifier to find that tin clack copper wire that those are going to be in the older homes usually pre-world war ii um so stop before the 50s but you might still run into it in houses afterwards don't that doesn't mean it's uh going to be the end of the world all right next word i want to work on is grounding um grounding i like short simple definitions so anytime we connect anything to the earth we have grounded that item all right in europe they actually call it earthing um here in the united states we call it grounding not only do i want you know what it is but i want you to know why we do it all right now there's a couple other reasons but the two main ones that i want you to remember is to maintain zero potential the earth has electricity in it all right if you think about it you know it's nothing more than a gigantic electromagnetic generator so we do have a metal core that keeps spinning and it does create electricity um with that we have a north pole and we have a south pole and if i had a compass then electromagnetic field that it would be created that compass would be pointing to the north all right now that voltage that electricity that's in the earth that's being generated that varies that goes up and down it changes all right and when we talk about voltage and electrical flow in a little bit we're going to be discussing how i have to have a different voltage for electricity to move if they're both the same then electricity is not going to move plain and simple um so as it fluctuates in another analogy i guess i should back up i like to use a sea level because we can actually see that with our eyes um sea level is always going to be known as zero but anybody who's ever been to the ocean knows that every day twice a day the sea level goes up and the sea level goes down it changes it fluctuates all right but no matter where it is we're always going to cause sea level zero all right the same thing with our electricity our static electricity our voltage in the earth we're going to call that zero no matter if it's gone up or down now the goal is to attach everything to the earth so as the earth changes then the items changes and as long as everything's the same then electricity is not going to flow where the problem comes into play is if the electricity changes and this object doesn't we as humans come in between there it's going to want to equal out anytime there's a difference in voltage we're going to touch it and there's going to be a shock or a zap that ends up coming to it the next reason or next thing i want to talk about is lightning protection um and i guess i'm going to back up on on the grounding as well you know i hear a lot of i hear a lot of comments where people say that well that's where all the extra electricity is supposed to go we want to give it a path for the elect extra electricity to flow into the earth okay we do not want to let any electricity that we generate and we pay for we do not want to let that electricity flow into the earth and we don't want to waste it by sending it down there it's wasting our bill in fact that's called a fault more specifically a ground fault anytime electricity goes someplace that it's not supposed to go to is considered a fault and if it goes into the earth we call those ground faults all right and i usually pop up another another example you know like i'll take a a wire and and i'll pretend that we're going to put this into the energized slot of an outlet and let's say it's a 15 amp outlet and then i'll take the other end and i'll go outside and i'll have a ground rod out there all by itself in the middle of the yard driven into the earth a good 10 feet in there so i have a good electrical connection to the earth and i attach the other end to that ground rod so i got a 15 amp breaker on a 120 volt circuit with a 14 gauge wire and i have it plugged into the energized slot of an outlet only and to the ground rod outside all right now the earth is going to be zero that energized slot of the conductor is going to be 120 volts they are going to be different so anytime i have a difference in voltage electricity will flow all right but the earth is also a big resistor resistors limit the amount of electricity that's going to flow now there is an ohm test and everything else i'm not going to get into that because i quite frankly i think it just complicates things too much at 120 volts pressure it's easier for me to remember that somewhere around 5 amps will be flowing into that earth so electricity is going to flow it's going to flow into the earth it's going to be about 5 amps and i'm going to be on a 15 amp breaker so that 15 amp breaker is just going to see 5 amps of electricity flowing as long as it only sees 5 amps of electricity flowing it doesn't know that there's a problem it just lets it flow it's not going to turn off until i try to flow more than 15 amps that's when the breaker is going to trip but all that stuff is still energized it still has potentially more electricity if anybody touched it and they touch another pathway then they're going to also become a conductor and that's why that's dangerous anytime we have electricity going someplace that it's not supposed to go we want that power turned off as soon as possible all right we don't want it to stay on we don't want to let that extra electricity go someplace the only thing we're trying to do with that grounded connection is keep that zero potential keep everything in the house at the same potential so that anything that i touch inside after i've been outside will always be zero or whatever the earth is and i won't be getting any shocks when i touch anything now the other reason is going to be for lightning protection obviously lightning is going to have a lot more than 120 volts of pressure um it's going to i really don't even know what it is it's tremendous amount of pressure um creates a spark from the sky all the way down to the earth if that ends up hitting the house then we need to give that electricity a place to go otherwise it's going to find any path available so we want to let it go into the earth where it could safely disperse and then it's gone but a lightning strike is just a split second moment in time and we're given that's particular electricity of a very specific path to get into the earth and not damage anything in the house so going back grounding the short simple definition is item to earth all right any item i don't care if it's a a deck a porch chair or my electrical system which we'll do in most homes all right anytime we connect anything to the earth we have grounded that particular item all right why do we do it to maintain zero potential and in case the house gets struck by lightning next term is bonding and forgive me for not editing that one i slipped on it it's item to item is what i want you to remember not item to earth obviously i copied and i didn't edit that one slide so item to item any two different items so if i have if i have a hot water pipe and a cold water pipe all right and then i make a connection between those two pipes i bonded those two pipes the reason we bought them is so they maintain the same potential the reason why i want the same potential is because if i grab one with one hand and then i grab the other with the other hand i end up becoming the conductor and i will equal those out we don't want that to happen we want to make sure that those two items are going to be the same potential so that if somebody grabs those two items with two with both of their hands then they're not going to be the conductor that's going to equalize those things out all right and if you think about it you know so maybe it's not such a bad thing if i have item to earth up there you know the earth is an item and you know so anytime we take our our house system here in the house we're we're really taking our grounding system of our house and we're bonding it to the earth so really the only difference is when i use earth is one of those bonding items instead of saying bonding we're going to call it grounding all right and that's zero potential well we're going to say whatever the earth is is going to be the same potential so we want all those objects to be the same all right but same thing especially around pools when people get out of the water and they're touching you know the water in the conduit or the the goonite and the metal inside the pool that's going to be whatever the earth is if i get out of that and i touch the ladders and the diving board all those have to be bonded together because again i don't want to be the conductor that's going to equalize or equal those items out so review real short conductors anything that flows electricity so typically in our homes it's going to be aluminum copper and tin insulators anything that stops the flow of electricity so when i have a energized wire and i touch that wire on the plastic i don't feel the shock as long as that plastic insulation is as strong as it's supposed to be and it's not damaged i'm not going to feel a shock that's my insulator that's going to stop the flow of electricity it's going to keep it on the conductor grounding item to earth we do it because we want to maintain zero potential the earth is the biggest item on the earth because it's the planet and it's nothing can be bigger than the planet on the planet um so that's going to be our reference point that we're going to use and we're going to call it zero and also lightning protection we need to give that a pathway to get to the earth bonding item to item why do we bound to maintain the same potential between two objects all right next word we have up here is amps i like one word definitions again and for amps i'd like you to know that is current all right the biggest thing about amps is they don't disappear we can cancel them out but they don't disappear in other words if i have if i have a light bulb on a circuit and let's say it's 120 watt light bulb if i have 120 volts and i want to use 120 watts then i'm going to use one amp of electricity to allow that 120 watts to flow amps don't disappear so if i have one amp going out on the energized conductor then i'm going to have one amp coming back on the neutral conductor watts watts is the power i like to remember the term power with watts because we pay for power it's just easier for me the p's together you know make it simple so power watts they travel at the speed of light so the generator of the earth that's coming in here that's going to go ahead and create the wattage create the power it flows through my panel through my breaker through my wires goes through the light switch goes to the lights that are lighting up and then it changes to either light or light and heat it changes to whatever that object is and then it's gone all right so we pay for whatever wattage we use that's going to be creating those lights and doing whatever it needs to do all right so wattage travels at the speed of light and it stops when it gets done doing the work that it needs to be doing volts volts is pressure i'd like to think of it as a magnet um in fact when we create electricity we're taking coils and we're we're sending them around a magnet to go ahead and produce that voltage or that magnetic pull and push where it comes to it so the volts and the pressure the difference is going to be whatever the the difference between the two objects is anytime i do have a difference that's going to be causing an electrical flow they're always going to attempt to equalize out but if i keep adding more wattage and more voltage than one side then it's going to keep flowing and flowing across as it comes to it so in that analogy that i used before where i had the wire on the on the energized conductor side of the outlet that was at 120 volts of pressure we know the earth is going to be zero so i had a difference of 120 volts or at least somewhere in that ballpark and because there's a difference electricity is going to constantly flow now if i keep adding electricity it's going to keep on flowing until it's equalized out all right ohms ohms i want you to remember it as resistance um i used an analogy of a light bulb earlier that thin filament if we go back to those old incandescent light bulbs that thin filament actually limited the amount of electricity that would flow that was the resistance that resistance um limited the amps limited the wattage it doesn't limit the voltage the pressure's still there it's just how many watts and amps are going to be flowing through it so if that wire is thin enough where it only allows 120 watts of electricity to flow and i have 120 volts of pressure that's how i come up with my one amp we divide the watts into the volts and that gives us the amps where it comes to it so ohms is resistance it limits the flow of electricity and going back to our grounding example before i think i said five amps it's partly because that the the earth is a gigantic resistor all right for lack of a better term and and so when electricity flows into the earth it's really trying to get to the to the transformers on the pole but that earth is creating a resistance ohms and it's limiting the amount of flow that's going through it so as long as it keeps limiting that flow we're not going to exceed the breaker usage we're still going to stick in that five six ohm range somewhere in that ballpark all right alright okay sorry about that and i'm gonna have to for some reason i ended up with a crash on the computer all right okay alrighty well looks like we're getting it back up and running again all right so forgive me for not knowing your name and who this is but somebody said it's too many amps so i'm going to assume that what you mean by the amps that's flowing into the earth you think it's going to be less than the actual 5 amps that i was saying it is and it may be and we're not going to put an amp meter on it to find out exactly what it is there is a mathematical calculation the biggest point i want to get out of all this is going to be that it's not enough to it's not going to be enough to cause the breaker to trip and that's the bottom line so the next thing i want to talk about is phases and identifying voltage and how we do it um i meant the pc crash too many years got it all right it probably is the case you know but it's an apple product and these aren't supposed to be doing that but we'll see what happens later on but anyway when we determine the voltage in a house we mostly just basically look at the wires we don't put voltmeters on there and determine what it's going to be um you know so we're gonna if we have three wires that come in there um well let's start off with two wires if i have two wires that come in there we're going to assume the first wire is going to be the neutral conductor or the grounded conductor and then where the second wire is going to be an energized conductor so if i have the neutral or grounded that's going to be my zero and if i have an energized conductor that's going to be my 120. now i really don't care if you say 110 115 120 none of that really means anything to me um because again we're not going to get the exact voltage that comes in there what i do care is when we get to a a single phase with two energized conductors that we use the proper terms so if i have three wires coming in the first wire is going to be the neutral wire again then i'm going to have two energized conductors that two energized conductors then it's going to be a combination system we're going to refer to it as either 110 220 115 230 120 240 whatever it is whatever you use on that first number all i'm asking is that you double it um it's going to discredit yourself real quick and easy if you try to say that it's 110 240 or something like that so just using the right terms is always best and if we look at the picture in the diagram that's coming in there the middle wire of those three wires that's my neutral that's my zero all right that comes in there so if we take the energized conductor on the left hand side that's going to be at 120 volts if i measure the difference between the neutral and that 120 or neutral and net energized conductors i'm going to get that 120 volts if i measure the same thing on the right side energize conductor and i measure that between the neutral and the energized conductor that's still going to be 120 volts and then when i measure between the two energized conductors and this is where i get the 240 volts that's going to go ahead and measure out one will be positive 120 and with alternating current it's always going to change from positive 120 to negative 120 positive 120 negative 120. and when i showed a sine wave a little bit later because we are going to go over this a couple different times when i show the sine wave a little bit later you know you're going to see how it goes positive negative positive negative and it actually does that about 60 times every second all right and which we call a 60-second cycle all right so when one wire is positive when one wire is positive then the other wire is going to be negative and then in between the two of them that's going to be 240 volts of pressure that comes in there one thing that you know i get asked a lot now this breaker just has one switch on it but sometimes we'll see a two pull breaker and if you look at the 240 circuit on the left side it looks like it's on the right side as well but either one of those we're going to have a bar that ties the two of those together and let's say each one of those is 30 amps on each one of those switches or breakers and what we don't do is we don't add them up all right so if it's 30 and 30 that doesn't mean that it's a 60 amp circuit all right same thing with our main disconnect we don't add up however many amps are going to be flowing on there so it's hard for me to see on this one i'm going to guess that yeah i'm just going to guess it's 100 amps and it doesn't matter what it is we're just going to make an assumption to that so if it's 100 amp circuit that comes up there that means i'm going to allow up to 100 amps to flow on my energized conductor i'm going to allow 100 amps to flow on the other energized conductor and if you remember i said amps don't disappear so you know off the cuff i could start thinking well shouldn't i be sending 200 amps if they're fully loaded up there you know that's not true all right they don't disappear but they do cancel each other out and that's why we can get by with two energized conductors and only one neutral we don't have to have two neutrals coming back out of it in fact nowadays we do what we call shared neutrals on many circuits inside of a house all right so if i hit 100 amps flowing on the right side energized conductor and i had zero amps flowing on the left side conductor i will have 100 amps flowing on my neutral conductor since all three of these wires are designed to carry 100 amps not a problem so if i let's take another scenario kind of the same 100 amps flowing on the right side conductor and 100 amps flowing on the left side conductor all right that's gonna since one is positive and the other one's negative positive 100 plus a negative 100 actually equals zero so if they're both the same i will not have any electricity flowing on the neutral there's going to be some situations such like central air conditioning heat well pumps electric radiant baseboard heat those objects everything that's in those appliances are all 240 appliances because of which both phases are going to be equal you're going to see that they don't even run a neutral wire to those items because we don't need it we only need the neutral wire in case those two energized conductors are different so if i'm flowing 100 amps on the right side and i'm only flowing 50 amps on the left side that means i'm still going to have 50 amps that's going down the neutral i have to bring that in balance back the first 50 will cancel each other out and then whatever is left over will go down the neutral so the only way that i can even get up to 100 amps is if i have 100 amps flowing on one side zero on the other and that's gonna allow me to have a hundred amps flowing on the neutral wire then as soon as i start adding electricity to the left side or amperage to the left side that brings down the neutral they're going to cancel each other out so and i mentioned before about appliances such as um well pumps and air con central air conditioning systems and electric radiant baseboard heat those don't require a neutral system but let's say i hit an electric stove or electric dryer all right those are also 240 appliances but with those appliances i actually need a neutral wire and the reason is because i'm going to end up having 120 light bulbs in there maybe a 120 computer so that's only going to take power off of one side it's not going to be equal on both sides because it's not going to be equal on both sides now i have to have a neutral bringing down the difference so we're going to end up with two energized conductors one neutral conductors and we should have also a grounding uh just in case we get a phase fault or something happening there all right okay so identifying the amperage there's a few different things that we have to look for when we're doing that um number one is going to be the main breaker all right now it does happen that somebody can go in there and replace a panel and they'll use the old wires that were in existence then and then they're going to put it on a 100 amp breaker and then all of a sudden they're going to be advertising that we have 100 amp service and yet we still have a number six copper wire that's feeding the system and that number 6 copper wire is only designed for 60 amps but yet now i have a 100 amp breaker on it that doesn't make it 100 amp service so there's a few things that we need to look for i did post this chart up on my website the homeinspectors.com sorry for the cheap plug but if you go to education and employment on there you're going to see we're determining the amperage chart is up there so stuff that you're going to need to know is size of the main breaker size of the service entrance cable so the wires that are feeding us and we go back to the chart that i wrote up earlier you're going to need to know the rating of the disconnect panel so that's this panel here you're going to need to know the rating of the meter panel itself which is going to be on the outside now the problem with the meter panel is we don't have access to the inside to see the data plate the disconnect panel we do so sometimes it'll be on the back door or on the dead front plate sometimes it'll be either on the left or the right on those things but we do have access to them you know when we're looking at the stuff so we can see what the chart and see what they're rated for and then we want to go whatever the weakest link out of those items are if that main disconnect that we're looking at here is not equal to or less than everything else then it's considered dangerous all right that means we're going to allow more electricity to flow through one of those items that the electricity isn't designed to carry that much all right another item i left off the list is going to be our service entrance pipe and the size of that cable coming in there i can't put two thicker wires inside of that either so whatever our weakest link is that's what we're going to be pointing out so this is where we're talking about our meter enclosures and let's see if i could do something here nope i can't all right i'm just going to have to fix this on every slide until i figure out why the problem is and i'm not going to solve that now all right all right so meteor enclosures i'll show you a picture of those in a little bit and okay let's just get right to these things the pipe sizes if you want to write those down that's going to be on the chart on my website so three quarter inch to one inch it's roughly about the 60 amp mark one inch to inch and a half is going to be the the 100 amps and then once we get to two inches and above is where we're going to start getting to the two inch marks coming in there oh i think i figured out here what's going on and maybe i haven't okay okay so as we get it back into the meter enclosures we talk about the different shapes and we're just gonna zip right through these and go back to the meter enclosures that we're seeing all right so these typical square boxes they called a boxes um the panels now we're not talking about the meters themselves we're talking about the actual panel those are usually designed to carry somewhere around 60 to 100 amps you're gonna see these with a lot of number two aluminum wire service feeds coming in there um so 100 amps is pretty typical in our area all right these old rectangular ones with the glass in there um these again were typically 60 amps that came in there um and without getting inside of it we're not going to know but yeah if you start seeing 100 amp services on these things they mean somebody changed the panel on the wires coming in there um i don't think it's necessarily the end of the world but when you know upon them is never a problem until it becomes a problem and if these things are only rated for 60 amps and we're seeing 100 amp service coming in there we should be calling these things out again just another view the rectangular ones with the glass front in here these are typically for 100 amps this one i like it's an old round meter panel if you had a test on this one i would be calling it as 30 amps um you will see up to 60 amps into these systems sometimes they do let them be overfused in a little bit of a way but 30 amps is going to be the magic number i want you to remember um this one is is our most common one that we're going to run into and these are typically for 100 amps i have seen them gone up to 200 amps but mostly the the meter panel ratings for these things are going to be at 100 amps the bigger ones the larger rectangular ones that go into the earth these are going to end up being for 200 amp services they're just more common again 200 amps underground coming in here you can see how much wider the panel is and how much more area it's able to hold all right let's move here older service meters and we don't really see too many of these things where they say 15 on them those are typically going to be for up to 100 amps um this 130 is up to 200 amps these are the old one-way meters everybody's switching over to the smart meters now we just don't have these dials or clocks on there any longer all right you know here's another one cl another old dial meter one way you know sorry i don't have a picture of the newer one i thought that was up in there all right wire gauge is gonna be our next thing we went through it before so typically we're gonna either see a number six feeder coming in there that's going to be for 60 amps a number two aluminum or a number three copper and these do need to be committed to memory um those are what we're gonna see for 100 amps and then we're going to be dealing with two odd copper most likely for 200 amps on where it comes into it and that's what they're showing here so i know it says number four that is what the nec calls for but very common in the chicagoland area we're going to see number three coppers why is that the service mass need to be the same as what's in the panel um we run into this quite a bit you're going to see that the mass that comes down there all of a sudden might be a number six wire or the even the service drop coming across the top could be a number six wire and then as it comes inside it's either bigger or smaller so somebody got into the meter and change things out we want to make sure those wires are the same size and at least you know we should be suspicious when things are changed i also like to look at that tag on the meter panel and it's a tamper tag if i see that that's cut or broken in any which way um then i know that somebody was in there doing some sort of work uh in our area the electric company is the authority having jurisdiction they're the ones that can approve or disapprove any sort of hookup where it comes to it so if they want to have smaller wires that are feeding their system they could do whatever they want to do you know they're the authority having jurisdiction but for me and and for our company we don't want to take ownership of issues so if we see something that's out of the norm we're going to document it plain and simple meter panels are not supposed to have anything coming off of them all right so if we do see outlet or something in here we don't know if it's before the meter or after the meter or but either way we're not supposed to be using the meter panel as a junction box and so we can't run wires to it so we shouldn't see any taps coming off of it either this one i just thought was pretty cool they could have advertised it free air conditioning was being given so if you look at the meter in the upper right corner and we file that pipe coming down we see that it goes to the disconnect for the air conditioning we go to our seal tight and that feeds there now if this was all done before the meter that wattage that's being used for that air conditioner is not going through the meter hence that meter is not going to be that meter is not going to end up being uh reading any sort of electricity that's going to be done through the air conditioning unit we do have to do a little bit of writing here um if we have an overhead service drop and then we need to know what our clearances are so these do need to be memorized all right roadways 18 feet i'm more worried about the nec comet is for my local jurisdiction they do allow less but we don't see too much of that all right so roadways 18 feet residential driveway 12 feet i would like you to still know driveways that are designed for farm equipment that's actually 15 feet so 18 for roadways 15 for farm equipment 12 for residential uh driveways pedestrian or any place that i could walk underneath those wires whether it's a deck lawn sidewalk whatever 10 foot clearance from that windows doors porches um etc that's three feet and that's mostly horizontal and below all right so as i as i measure that it's going to be if i'm standing in front of a window and i'm looking out so we're going to go you know from the one side to the front to the other side to down below is that's all three feet five feet for the local electric company here in chicago but three feet for the nec that doesn't include above all right i could be right above the window i can't be in front of the window but i can actually be right above it when it comes to it other things that come into play is over roofs let's see if that's here it is here good when we're dealing with over roofs if it's a sloped roof and a sloped roof is anything over 212. all right anything under 212 is gonna be considered a flat roof we have two numbers that we have to memorize for this it's 18 inches and three feet and it all depends on the horizontal run all right so what we're saying in this drawing is that from that service mast until it gets to the overhang that is going to be that has to be less than four feet if it's less than four feet then i could be within 18 inches of the roof and we're talking about the lowest point so here we see that there's a splice that's pretty that's pretty much our lowest point on there maybe it's right at the gutter line but that lowest point has to be at least 18 inches off the ground now if that horizontal run is greater than four feet then that changes to be a a three foot clearance to that roofline these are windows again again three feet right left front below and it's just the wires we're not talking about the mast or the pipe that we see we're talking about just the wires themselves all right so where that drip loop is coming into play because that's less than three feet from that window that's something we should be calling out for clearance issues clearance issues also come into play at the panel down in the basement we need to have enough room to where the electrician or was ever going to be working on this panel that they could work on it safely all right so there there can't be anything that's going to trap them into this little area and it needs to be wide enough so they could get in there and work so if you're going to be memorizing numbers you know 30 inches width and it's not 30 inches from the center or from the left and the right it's just 30 inches total of working room in front of it so if this thing's off in a corner kind of on one side but i still have a good 30 inches or more workspace to it that's okay behind the panel is 36 inches if i have to crawl into a tub or i got a post or something it's supporting things then that comes into play as well the height of the panel is typically six and a half inches um the area above the panel is kind of a a safety zone for the electric there really shouldn't be anything that goes up there above it you know we want to let more conduit or anything that's going to expand on the system we want to give them easy access i mean i don't have it in me to tell somebody to go ahead and move that waistline that's above it but it would have to get me to start thinking if i thought that it was put there originally i would probably be less inclined to say something about it if i thought that it was a rehab and it was added then i think i'd be a little more inclined to say something about it so again no foreign objects are above that panel it's a dedicated space um one thing that you know corey put in here for me which i'm thankful for is he cited the actual codes in the nac where it's in there so if you want to verify this that's where you would find it the minimum height or i'm sorry maximum height of the breaker is six seven um for usually they're going to be around eye level is what i like to see common sense here we got the electrical panel behind the water heater there's really no way of anybody to get in there and do any sort of work stuff like that is kind of a no-brainer all right so this is a little bit of review of what we saw before we're still going to refer to these as a single phase system um again we're only going to be counting the wires that come in there now this picture throws a little bit of a curveball because one of those wires that we're seeing is the grounding electrode conductor and on the left side there's a bus bar and that's attached to the back of the panel and that's where my grounding electro conductor is attached to all right so we're not going to count that wire when it comes into it but we are going to count the other three neutral hot hot one of the other things too when you open up the door to the panel if you see two breakers tied together so a 240 breaker then that's another good clue that you have a single phase 120 240 system if you open up that door and you see three breakers tied together and this is going to be either on condo buildings or big large homes and those those are three-phase systems we're going to stay out of those they can start creating arc blast that gets really dangerous it's going to be over all of our heads i'm going to ask that you you know refer them off to an electrician and just say you don't know so don't take the cover panels off unless you know what you're doing on those again you're going to have three energized connectors the easiest quickest clue that you're going to end up seeing those are going to be three breakers all tied together when it comes to it so typically again they're going to be on either commercial buildings or very large residential buildings that comes to it so we mentioned before about measuring between the hot and the neutral 120 we measure between the hot and hot that's where we get our 240 comes in there so this is our typical sine wave and the way this works is i'm going to have a magnet that's going to take a coil one sided magnet will be positive the other side of the magnet will be negative and each time that goes around that coil is going to create a positive charge a negative charge positive charge negative charge in which case it's going to create a positive voltage negative voltage and it's going to happen 60 times every second that it's going to revolve around there hence we get the 60 second cycle now with a 120 and that was a 120 sine wave that came in there that was one cycle that you saw when we're dealing with a 240 cycle it's basically the same thing but both of those wires are completely out of phase of each other so in this case the blue wire would be the same one we saw before where the red wire would be the opposite as as it comes in there but you can see when one is positive 120 the other one is negative 120 and then they switch places the difference between the two of them maxed out is going to be 240 volts now the electrical panel talk about clearances and these are meant to be a little bit humorous but you're going to run into them when people finish their basements they if they want to have a bathroom or a shower and that electrical panel is there then i guess they're going to put the panel in shower and everything right here where the panel is i mean it doesn't take a you know a rocket scientist here to determine that that's just not a smart move all right and greater we don't want to let any water get in there that's true but more realistic i mean you know just putting the plastic over it isn't really going to protect anything it's the humidity so if that humidity starts getting into that panel that humidity causes things to rust rust is resistance resistance creates heat and that's when we start getting into problems with our electrical panel all right so here we lifted it up it's just not a not a smart idea i do want to show you what aluminum wire looks like more specifically solid aluminum um these are the neutral conductors that are coming back and they're on the neutral bus bar but you can see that we have plastic insulation you can see how silver and shiny everything looks in these diagrams or these pictures and again this is a mandatory defect solid aluminum branch circuits we do have to report the presence of that and that's proto-state of illinois sop c-u-a-l-c-o-a-l-r those are all different ways to determine whether or not the appliance or the breaker or the switch or the outlet is able to take copper or aluminum or both all right and so if you see cocu that stands for copper a-l-a-l-r that stands for aluminum if you start seeing a do not enter sign on these things then that's gonna be a problem so this slide here talks again about the solid aluminum branch circuit all right so if it's stranded it's okay if it's a service wire or feeder wire that's okay doorbell other transformers those are typically stranded that's going to be okay aluminum wire will be in plastic and not in cloth even though i still think tin clay copper is just ridiculously old and it gets dried out and brittle that's just my opinion on it it's not a mandatory defect so we don't have to call that out that's going to be focused more on your opinion i mentioned earlier when we were writing some things down that aluminum solid aluminum branch circuit was used from the mid 60s to the mid 70s the aluminum wire industry is actually making a push to put their wires back into residential electric their solid wires back in here um they they say that they've remixed the aluminum and redid it so it doesn't have that aluminum creep and that different sizing stuff that comes in there and they feel that it's safer they're still requiring that things have to be torqued because obviously they don't want to take responsibility to stuff and because nobody's ever going to be torquing and tightening screws and wires um so far the code officials are just fighting it and they're pretty much not allowing it to come in there so i don't think it's written into our codes at all um where it's allowed to come into it but i do know that the aluminum industry or the wire industry is making a push for that as well so aluminum wires considered an increased fire hazard plain and simple we're going to go through a lot of these terms as well we're going to hit that grounding and bonding again as we go through these things and gets a few different definitions in here all right i'm not going to go as heavy as i did earlier on this but grounding or ground as i mentioned earlier it's an intentional connection to the earth all right it does give us lightning protection it creates an electrical reference point and that reference point is what we're going to call zero so when i say creates an electrical reference points i'm really saying that it's it makes a zero potential or whatever the earth is all right it makes everything else that's touching the earth become the same potential as the earth so since we're going to call it earth zero everything else that's grounded is also going to be zero so if i touch two items that are both grounded they're both going to be the same potential they're both going to be zero i am not going to be a conductor that's going to equalize those items out all right offers protection from ground fault circuits and this one i have to disagree with a little bit it doesn't really give us protection from ground fault circuits um in fact if we hand a ground fault it it's the bond that gives us the actual protection and when we talk about the bond um we're talking about the connection between the main bond which is the the connection between my grounding system and my neutral system because we stated earlier that if i if i only have five ms of electricity flowing into the earth then that's not going to be enough to trip the breakers so what i have to do is get that ground fault all right because electricity is going into the earth when it's not supposed to so that's a ground fault when what i have to do is get that ground fault back onto the neutral so or the grounded conductor if i can get it onto the neutral wire now there's no resistance on it at all whatever electricity is available on the system will attempt to flow far more than that five amps that the earth is going to allow far more than 15 amps that the breaker is going to trip off at if i go over 15 amps even if that 15 amp breaker is broken it's going to be far more than the 100 amp or 200 amp main disconnect breaker all right we're going to have a treme i really don't know what the number is but it's far greater than that 200 amps in fact it's so much that even if the 15 amp breakers is um bypassed or overridden and the the 200 amp breaker is damaged and that's not tripping off there's going to be so much electricity flowing at that point in time that that wire is actually going to catch on fire it's going to burn up and it sounds like it's dangerous but in all reality it's a good thing because if it catches on fire it breaks and air is a resistor air is enough to keep electricity from flowing if i keep two wires far enough apart electricity will not flow if i get them close enough together we're going to start getting sparks like lightning you know so when we get the air there's no electricity flowing but if there's enough voltage to jump the air then we'll get it to go ahead and flow on there um so what we want to do you know is burn that wire up if we can't trip the breakers i mean breakers are number one priority trip those turn the power off everything's safe if they're broken or damaged in any which way we burn it up or break the connection we don't allow for another person to get shocked or electrocuted we don't allow for that constant flow of electricity to get heated up and start creating or putting the structure on fire all right so grounding does not necessarily give us that protection from ground fault so that one i kind of want to dispel bonding does all right so going back to bonding item to item makes two things the same potential all right i want you to also know what the main bond is all right for most city water systems our main bond is going to be located at the first means of disconnect so wherever that first main panel is the first thing that i go ahead and turn the power off on that's where my bonds going to be in my home my disconnect is located outside in the meter panel so i'm going to have a grounding electrode conductor coming out of that and go into my water pipes i actually have a secondary ground that goes to a ground rod that's right below it all right that doesn't even though it's tied into my distribution panel my main distribution panel does not have another bond in it so my grounding electro conductors go from from the first means of disconnect in my case it's outside most homes it's going to be wherever the main panel is going to be located at and that first main disconnect that's there the two systems that we're connecting is my grounding system and my neutral system so that if any wire that comes loose it's going to energize the case and i guess i should back up and make up a make-believe object so let's say we have a an electric dryer all right that electric dryer has wires that are built into it if one of those wires that energizes the motors comes loose in there and falls and touches the case or the metal container of that dryer it's going to energize that dryer or at least the case of that dryer even if it gets stripped free of the insulation and that rubs on the dryer that's also going to be energizing the dryer all right if that dryer has a ground plug so a three prong plug on there that ground plug is going to be energized so we energize the case the ground plug or prong is connected to the case that's energized it's going to be energized to the juncture box to all of my conduits all my plumbing pipes all those items are connected together so as soon as i have an energized conductor energize the case it actually energizes all my plumbing system all my conduits all the cases and everything else that has a ground plug that's plugged into you know any grounded outlet all those items are instantly energized because i have one loose wire touching that i'm hoping you can see how dangerous that is and we need to turn that power off as fast as possible to keep everything safe coming in there so what we need to do if i i need to get that electricity back over onto the neutral so my main bond connects my grounding system to my neutral system my grounding system will only flow 5 amps not enough of a flow to go ahead and trip the breakers so i need to have unlimited flow of electricity or unlimited flow of amperage to go ahead and allow that breaker to trip all right so in this situation we'll talk about bonding and we'll get into uh get into that again and we'll build a bond and the sub-panels how we don't bond um i made a comment earlier about faults fault is anytime electricity is doing something that it's not supposed to be doing so typically with breakers we're going to have an overload fault so in here they're showing that we're putting a 50 amp load or any type of work more than what that breaker is allowed to handle and if it's a 20 amp breaker and i'm trying to flow 50 amps through it that breaker should sense that and trip and turn the power off so now no electricity goes through it phase the ground that only works and if we follow the power back wire comes loose just the way the electric dryer that i may mention energizes the conduit as long as that conduit is attached to my box it's going to energize the box on the bottom there's a bar that connects my two neutral bus bars and you'll see a green screw in there all right so on the bottom that green screw actually goes right into the neutral bus bars where that metal is connected to it it goes through the gray or black plastic insulation so the insulator is the black plastic so that it separates my ground my neutrals and everything and my energized conductors and my bus bars it keeps all those separated and then it keeps going through that all the way into the back of the panel so it screws into the panel so if my conduit is energized my box is energized that bonding screw is energized that bonding screw is connected to my neutral bus bar now my neutral wire is energized now i don't have any sort of resistance at all whatever is available on the system will attempt to flow far more than that 20 amp breaker far more than the 100 amp main disconnect so those should trip right away and even if they don't then we're going to go ahead and get a a burned up wire which will actually break the power as well so the second one is a short circuit also known as a neutral fault and i should say the third one going down there that's a neutral fault that one's real simple i take the hot and i touch it to the neutral i don't have to worry about anything else i'm trying to flow whatever is available on the system again more than with the breaker more than the main breaker those two will pop or one of the two will pop and then if they don't then the wire burn up and then we have a phase of phase both of those are considered short circuits you know if we're going to have a phase to phase so hot to hot that voltage separation is going to be bigger so the phase the neutral short circuit that's going to have 120 volts and it's going to create 120 volt spark if i have a phase of phase short circuit that doubles the voltage doubles the size of the spark where it comes into it um but it's still going to trip the breaker and that's the big audacious goal get the power turned off anytime that the electricity isn't going where it's supposed to go we want that power to turn off as fast as possible sometimes we're going to run into houses where they're older homes and they didn't have grounding systems in there the old outlets were two-pronged outlets that came in there um this isn't the best practice and the the drawback with this is many of those three prong testers we use we don't really find it you know this is gives me one of the one of the one of the cases i make for why i like non-metallic cable when we're dealing with non-metallic cable for the most part they're going to have an energize the neutral and then they're also going to have a grounding wire in there as well so if we end up replacing some of these things then we can still make sure that everything is grounded now will this work if i have a wire come loose and and energize the case yeah it will all right that will go ahead and get the wire over to the neutral but in all reality because the neutral always carries amperage we said amperage doesn't disappear and if it's 120 doing something like this is basically the same thing as bonding a sub-panel we're putting that particular ground and and that particular neutral together and if i have another ground path coming in there i'm actually inviting amperage on my grounding system and that we just don't want to do um not to mention if somebody wires this outlet up wrong and they do it in a reverse polarity and i'm sure that anybody who has experience in this we run into a lot of outlets that people just don't know that the brass screw gets the black wire or the energized wire and the silver screw gets the neutral conductor and the green screw gets the ground if somebody flips those backwards or disconnects it and reconnects it now i'm energizing the case of whatever i'm plugging into this outlet and to me that's just it's just dangerous all right we want to keep our grounds and our neutrals separate everywhere except at that one location and at one location only and that's our main bond and that's again going to be at the first means of disconnect a little bit more on outlets here um not you should have a rough idea of which slot is which and which um screw and how many amps each one is designed and so forth so the first one on the left we can see that both slots go straight up and down all right we do have uh the round cave cave-like one and the cave-like one is going to be my ground prong or my ground slot that comes in there so that green screw that's on the bottom left both of those ground ports i guess go to that green screw it also goes to those metal tabs at the top and the bottom and those screws that are in the top of the bottom those are all tied into the ground system for that particular outlet so many times because in conduit areas like where we live here in chicago we're not going to run separate ground wires to these outlets we use the conduit that comes in there so we really don't make a connection to that ground wire or that green screw on there because those little plates that are at the top and the bottom they're screwed into the 1900 box or the outlet box on there and as long as i have a metal metal connection then that outlet will be grounded plain and simple the narrow slot on the right hand side that's for the energized conductor if you look at the screws on the right hand side you'll see those screws are brass screws that go in there the wider slot on the left side that's for my neutral conductor slot and you'll see the screws on that are silver so the black wire goes to the black brass screw the white wire goes to the silver screw and if it was a non-metallic system and i had a ground wire in there as well then the ground wire would go in there now if you notice it says all 15 amps underneath it as well all right whenever i have the neutral slot and the energized slot and they're both going straight up and down that tells me it's a 15 amp outlet plain and simple i take the next one in there and you can see how it's shaped like a t up in there so if i have a if i had the energized conductor straight up and down and then i have a the neutral slot horizontal that's for a 20 amp outlet all right when i get the t as we're showing here that's telling me that it's either 15 or 20 it'll work on either one i could wire it up to a 14 gauge or to a 12 gauge and i take that back i should have only a 12 gauge wire going to those and you will find that back on a lot of 14 gauges going off to the right even more we start seeing 240 receptacles and these 240 ones are going to have the energized conductor slot on a horizontal phase all right so that's going to tell me that's a a 15 or 20 plug and that's going to be for a 240 volt circuit the bottom one is kind of a split receptacle and the bottom one here is designed for a 240 circuit where the top one is only designed for a 120 circuit that comes in there so you are going to see some weird and awkward outlets but i'd like you to be able to determine what's what and what they mean all right so again these are just single um dedicated outlets so the one on the left is going to be our 15 amp the one on the right will be our 20 amp and only because we have that horizontal plug all right this is probably about the safest way to put a plug on there um what is missing is the the actual cover plate that holds the actual outlet itself right now we just have a 1900 box there's supposed to be another plate on there that i could screw those the top and the bottom of the outlet on there but at least they went ahead and they put another ground wire from the outlets to the box on there and as long as that box and all the conduit going backwards is all connected then even if i remove that outlet i am still grounded all right otherwise if that outlet was loose and free it wouldn't be grounded the only way i would be able to ground it is to get those metal prongs touching it again all right all right typical circuit we come off our panel um it's our energized conductors goes to the energized side of the bulb and we got a neutral coming back that's going to be the separations 120 volts typically what we end up seeing electricity flows in lights up our light bulb once we get our complete circuit so again if this light bulb is a 120 watt light bulb and i have 120 volts of service that means i'm going to have one amp of electricity being used to go ahead and work that light bulb that one amp will be measured on the energized conductor and if i put an amp meter on the neutral conductor i will also measure one amp on that as well i don't need the ground wire to make this circuit worse what we want the ground wire for is just in case that electrical the hot or ungrounded conductor the energized conductor in case that comes loose and energizes something we need another pathway to catch that and trip the breaker and again we need to have that bond in order to make that happen so let's build up a multi-wire circuit here we're going to take one of our hot breakers and slide that into place we'll take our other one and we'll slide that into place we'll go ahead and we'll take one of our energized conductors we'll run it to our light bulb and bring the neutral back um and we'll bring the neutral back to our neutral bus bar all right 120 watts on our bulb one amp going out one amp coming back in plain and simple now we're going to do what we call shared neutrals here so we're going to have another light bulb that goes on there we're going to hook that up to our opposite breaker all right and i guess i also want to take a moment here and talk about that staggered bus bar that we're looking at inside of our panel so you can see that the one bar on the left is taking power off of the top breaker the bar on the right is taking power off of the bottom breaker and i'm talking about the main disconnect at the very top of this diagram all right so when i have these two breakers right next to each other even though they're both on the right side just because it is staggered bus bar the bottom breaker is taking it off of the taking its electricity off the left side the second from the bottom breaker or the one where the red line goes to it is taking its power off the right side so they're both opposite phases one's getting when it's positive the other one's negative so now we energize that on the opposite phase we bring our neutrals back in here and everything back both light bulbs are going to work and we made our connection between the two connections we have 240 volts but because i connected the neutrals on there that's going to keep both of those at 120 coming in there so if each one of these light bulbs is 120 watts that means each one of these light bulbs is going to allow one amp of electricity to flow one amp is going to go into the light bulb each one of these one amp is going to come out of the light bulb on the neutral each one of these when i get to that point that little black dot on there where they meet at that point in time now i'm no longer going to have any of any amperage flowing down that wire all right they're both going to cancel each other out and then we're going to end up having zero amperage from that point forward however if i disconnect that neutral conductor now think about what i just did i have electricity on alternating current going in one flowing down the neutral or the other connecting to the neutral of the next light bulb because i'm not connected to my neutral bus bar any longer now in theory i ended up creating a 240 volt circuit those bulbs are not designed to carry that much voltage they'll probably end up burning up real quick and that's where our problems are going to be so here's just another bit of math it's basically the same the same thing with bigger numbers if we have a thousand watt load and i always like to say you know use numbers of like 120 it just makes life easier but a thousand watt load i divide by 120 volts that's going to give me 8.3 amps that's how they come up with it so 8.3 on each energized conductor 8.3 on each of the neutral conductors zero amps after those two neutral conductors came back together this is actually called sharing neutrals all right so if i have less wattage or less amperage being used on one side than the other now i will have amperage flowing on the ones that are shared and this is part of the reason why those electric stoves we end up needing to have a neutral wire coming back in there because i'm going to have those 120 volt circuits such as light bulbs and computers and timers things like that that aren't going to be 240 so they're going to be unequal and i need to bring the balance back so whatever the balance is left side 8.3 right side 4.1 um the balance is 4.2 that balance is what's going to be brought back to the neutral busbar in order to get the full load only one side has to be running electricity while the other side is not doing anything then we're going to have the full load on one side neutrals neutrals cannot be cut to make this type of splice at the receptacle on a multi-wire circuit okay and yeah they're supposed to be stripped back of the insulation and then kind of flipped over it what we don't want to have somebody do is unscrew the wire and then all of a sudden it ends up creating a problem notice the upper wire the feed is burning up it's starting to overheat continuity was stopped and that ended up creating um an open circuit on there and once we open that up now we're creating 240 volts circuits where they're only intended to be 120 volts and that's when you're going to start getting things overheating all right now this one if you look back at the panel you can see we moved that second breaker up a slot when we did that now both of those breakers are taking power off of the same phase now we said before that amperage will cancel each other out but in this case since they're both on the same side they're not opposites any longer we're going to be adding them up and now we're going to start overloading so if i got a 20 amp breaker and 12 gauge wire and i'm running 12 and a half on one side 12 and a half on the other side since they're on the same phase we're going to actually add the amperage at this point of time so on that neutral because amperage doesn't disappear it will add up and you're going to end up having 25 amps if you have a neutral wire where you see heated up chances are and sometimes when you look at these panels it's hard to tell what goes where when and how but there's a pretty good chance one of two things is happening either it was a shared neutral circuit and they got the breakers on the run on the same phase so they're not on different phases coming in there or i had a loose connection um that happens when we start double tapping and triple tapping underneath that neutral bus bar and that starts creating resistance anyway my neutrals are heating up and these connect these connections are burning and it actually started to fire a small fire but a fire nonetheless inside that panel another multi-wire circuit um and when we deal with multi-wire circuits if they're in different different boxes i don't have to tie them together all right i could keep them separate all right so we got multi-share neutral multi-wired circuits the black wire coming up at the top feeds the two right outlets the red wire feeds the two left outlets coming in there as long as the amperage is the same or whatever it is the neutrals are going to only carry the balance if anything back to the neutral bus bar all right i do not have to have a 240 circuit or a 240 breaker on this situation however if i decide to make one of those outlets a split receptacle all right so now what i did was i separated the top and the bottom of the outlet and i i'm feeding the top up outlet off of the red wire and i'm feeding the bottom one off of the black wire they're both coming off of two different phases i'm still bringing one neutral wire coming back in here because that's in the same junction box i have to tie those two together all right the rationale behind this is that if i turn the breaker off to one the entire thing needs to be dead i don't want somebody going in there and working on this and then thinking it's dead when actually it's energized by the other breaker that comes in there all right so if i have a split receptacle from two different breakers and they're sharing the neutral coming back or even if they are from two different breakers and they're not sharing the neutral they have their own neutrals coming back and they need to be tied together so when i turn the power off to that box everything needs to be turned off all right the old standby a lot of people use these three prong testers um they for the most part they're great all right they're quick they're fast they give you a result that comes in there and sometimes when you look at them you can see that it's doing something a little awkward or a little bit different then that comes in there so if you see one of them is dimmer one light is dimmer than the other light that usually tells you that you're going to have like a bootleg ground or somebody's doing something awkward the one thing that i have found and and i didn't test this personally i just saw it in another video somewhere is that if this 120 volt outlet is accidentally wired as a 240 volt outlet and it's properly grounded and you plug this in there supposedly it's going to show normal you're going to get two yellow lights and everything's going to show correct on there if you get the more expensive testers um you know that's gonna pick that up i myself have never run into that um but who knows if i would have noticed it if it was because i don't take each outlet apart to look at the inside wiring all right but anyway if we one light in the middle open ground open neutral is the light on the right obviously if we don't have any electricity come to it we don't have the energized conductor operated anytime you have a red light up there that means we're going to have some sort of reverse polarity whether it's a hot neutral reverse or a hot ground reverse either way it's going to be some sort of a neutral polarity so basic home inspection present uh procedures they say we're supposed to look at a representative sample you should know that definition a representative sample is basically one per room or one on the outside on each wall that's the minimum that we actually have to test all right if it's more than that there's nothing wrong with that you know quite frankly we try to get every single outlet that we can now i'm not going to tip over china cabinets or move furniture to get to them but if it's out in the open or i i can reach to it i'm going to go ahead and do it i'm not going to unplug anything in order to get to the outlet but i'm going to hit as many as i can so i don't want to do the minimum i want to do as much as i can knowing what the minimum is and that's the least that you have to do when we come to it our industry standard is not invasive the three light tester provides for that can it be fooled yes it can can we get a safe normal reading on a three light tester and have a serious problem should we be using a more thorough instrument that's going to be your choice all right um right now there's nothing that says we have to all right use anything other than what's on there all right so what i'm going to do here is we're going to build this air conditioning system that's present here and it's a typical connection that we normally see and we want to talk about is it going to work is it safe what's going to protect us and so forth now just for the illustration obviously we don't have conduit going from one to the other but i want you to imagine that it's there the only reason why i didn't do that is just so i can make it clear with the wires and so forth that's coming to it all right so i got a central air conditioning compressor cabinet outside i have a disconnect panel that's going to it and it's connected via conduit on there as well typically that's going to end up being seal tight i do have one red wire one black wire so we have phase a and phase b is connected to it all right i do not have a neutral that's connected to this so the first question i always like to ask is this thing even going to work and the answer is going to be yes right now there's only two motors that's inside that air conditioner one motor is for the compressor that's compressing the refrigerant and the other one is going to be for the fan that's going to be blowing the air up going across both of those items are 240 volt items so because they're both 240 volts they will be using the same amount of amperage on both sides of the fields if i had a neutral wire on there i wouldn't have anything flowing down the neutral wire so i don't even need the neutral wire coming in there so yes this will work is it okay not only is it okay it's a very common setup that we end up seeing here next question there's no ground all right so is that okay all right so let's say there's no ground coming in there our problem now comes into play is if i get a if i get an electrical energized conductor come loose and that conductor now energizes the case that case is going to energize the air conditioning cabinet the conduit everything there except where that ground is failed so even when i'm checking air conditioning units if it's the metal seal tight and they're using that as a ground and they didn't run a separate one in there i make sure those are tight and secure if it isn't then i want to make sure that there's another ground wire that comes in there to make sure that i had that ground path going back in this situation i'm going to once that energized conductor comes loose touches the box my entire air conditioning system you know over here is ending up energized all right so if everything here is energized then i'm not able to you know clear that fault if i had a ground wire coming back through it then that ground wire would bring electricity back to the neutral down and get i'm sorry back to the case get it to my neutral bus or neutral bond on here the bond would get down to the neutral bus bar that would allow my free flow electricity and that's going to go ahead and allow everything to clear the fault and allow the breaker to trip and that's our big audacious gold again we want that power to turn off as fast as possible so here we're showing if it stays energized then whatever is going to be touching there is going to be remaining energized we're not going to have enough flow to go ahead and trip the breakers and that's where our problems come into play and you still get shocked and electrocuted so now we took a green wire we ran aground to our grounding bus bar we do have our new our bond inside there as well so now that wire comes loose and energizes our case which is going to energize our ground wire because that bond screw is there it's going to now energize my neutral bus bar that neutral bus bar allows for no resistance whatsoever so we're still going to have 5 amps go down the the grounding electro conductor but we're going to have unlimited amps going up the neutral wire that unlimited amps is going to be far more than the breakers so they should be tripping instantly and then our power is turned off and nobody's going to get hurt that's our main goal different types of grounds i'd like to talk to in the chicagoland area we [Music] we use water pipes we and think about it you got miles and miles and miles of underground steel lead copper you know unlimited pieces of metal that's underground which are fantastic um conductors and are going to allow everything to flow quick and easy we're still going to be limited all right that's still going to only limit 5 amps of electricity to flow because it still has to get from that over to the transformers so getting from those two points is where our resistance is going to end up being all right yeah there's just not enough electricity to flow to clear the path all right um different types of grounds let's go back to this one here and different types of grounds that we're going to run into so here it mentions the water pipes we already talked about the ground rod outside some areas of our country they don't have they don't have soils where they could dig into sometimes they're on bedrock and they can't take that piece of steel in there um sometimes it's going to be on a slab different things that we can use for a good connection to the earth item to earth um well casings all right so if i got a metal well casing that goes down i could ground to that i could do something called a ground ring so i would end up taking a number six or number two depending on the size of the electrical system and it would be a bare copper wire buried about a foot underground going around the entire perimeter of the house that's called a ground ring a ground plate is basically a four by eight sheet of metal laid flat covered in dirt um all these are good connections and oofer ground is another one now that's where i use the steel rebar that's in the concrete and i'm going to use that as my connection to the earth all of those are acceptable all right and all of those are going to help me dissipate lightning strikes and then they're all going to also help me maintain that zero potential bonding on the other hand we talked about item to item when we talk about the main bond all right or you know i hate to do the quotation mark thing when we talk about the bond that's going to be located at the first means of disconnect all right that bond is going to be connecting two distinct items so we said bond is item to item when we're talking about the bond or the main bond we're connecting the grounding system to the neutral system we're doing that so that if i do get a ground fault anywhere that's going to allow free flow electricity and we're going to basically change it into a short circuit and that's going to be tripping the breakers without that bond we're just going to be flowing electricity into the earth we're not going to have enough flow to go ahead and trip the breakers so that bond is vitally important when we open up our panels the first thing that we're going to look for is the bond i want to verify that i got my ground connection to my neutral connection that's how i know that if there's any wires that come loose anywhere that i can't see at least i got some sort of a pathway maybe that i have a pathway at that point of time to get it onto the neutral system after that the next thing i'm going to be looking for is my grounding electric i'm sorry my grounding electrode conductor all right or my gec that is also known as my ground wire but that's a specific ground wire all right that's going to go from the location where the bond is to wherever i'm going to be grounding this too so whether it's a ground rod whether it's a water pipe ground ring roofer ground ground plate well water pipe going in there whatever i'm grounding my house to that gec is my connection from the main where the main disconnect it's my connection from there to whatever i'm grounding to that grounding electroconductor does have some specific rules to it all right and i don't have them written down so if you have a pen and paper i would suggest that you write the following down i'll try and go a little bit slow depending on the size of the electrical system tells me the size that that gec needs to be gec grounding electro conductor all right if i am less than 150 amps then it could be a number six copper wire less than 150 amps on number six copper wire greater than 150 amps it needs to be a number two copper wire 150 amps or more i should say it needs to be a number two copper wire that gec is not allowed to have any splices in it whatsoever all right so when i identify it and i follow the conduit or i follow the gc going wherever it goes i want to make sure that it's not cut and it's and i don't have two connections under a mechanical splice i'm not allowed to do that there is one way or one type of splice that i could do it's called a pressure splice and they'll put a hydraulic tool on two pieces of wires and they'll squeeze the living daylights out of that thing until they meld it into one wire all right so there's no screws there's no mechanical connection they just squeeze it and basically made it into one wire you would have to literally cut it with cutters in order to break that connection again so if we could break a connection with the screw it's wrong if we have to cut it then that splice is okay and those splices don't have to be in a junction box so as i follow that out if i run into a junction box on my ground path i should be suspicious and those are going to be the areas that i'm going to open up and if you get inside that thing and you see your gecs are spliced together that's a problem because we're not allowed to splice those whatsoever right um they have to be if they're going to be in conduit they have to be in conduit by themselves all right we can't use that raceway to share with other electrical wires they have to be stand alone all by themselves so if i'm having trouble finding my gec and i'm inside the panel one of the things i could look for is in my conduits there should only be one maybe two you know if they go one to the water pipes and one to a ground rod outside i might have two of them but they should be one wire inside that conduit all by itself all right if any other wires do share and go in there that's going to end up being a problem nothing else goes in that gec by itself if the gec has insulation on it all right then that should have a mechanical connection because we want to use the conduit as well that protects the gec we want to use the conduit as part of our grounding system so we need to have a mechanical connection pretty much at both ends to the conduit if it's not in does not have insulation so it's a bare conductor for the gec and you will run into those those are not required to have a mechanical or a metal connection at each end so we don't have to tie it to the conduit um it makes sense because obviously if it's bare through and through then most likely it's going to be touching that conduit in multiple places that comes in there so no splices number six or number two 150 amps is my line on the sand nothing else shares in the conduit with it in chicago we have something called a chicago ground and they did that in a lot of the suburbs around here as well so they'll come out of the uh electrical box usually at the first means of disconnect and they'll go to the closest water pipe and when they get to the closest water pipe then that's where they're going to attach to attach their ground system or grounding electro conductor to that water pipe from there i need to follow that water pipe until i leave the building if i have any sort of dielectric unions or i'm switching to plastic pipes or something like that i've i've lost my grounding connection so i have to have jumpers over those if need be when i get to the water meter i want to make sure i'm jumping over the water meter as well because there's going to be a time when the water meter might if the house gets foreclosed and the water meter gets removed we don't want the person who's going to be connecting it together they're going to touch one side that's going to be zero they'll touch the water main that might be something different and once they touch those two different objects at their different potentials then that electricity is going to flow through them before they put it together so we need to have a jumper cable that's loose connected when i say loose i mean the wires aren't wrapped around it really tight the connections are tight and secure we should actually be moving those to make sure that they're tight so that i know i got a good connection between the um between both sides of my jumper cable all right ground bound it to neutral for to go ahead and clear the fault path good so there's our bond screw and these are just different examples of what we're going to see on the bond and again we're tying right below that it's going to be my my neutral bus bar all right so this whole thing over here is my neutral bus bar and there you can see where my bond screw is so that screw goes through that metal bond or metal bus bar it goes through the black plastic insulation right there and it ties into the metal box that's behind it as well now that metal plate runs behind the neutral and the energized conductors and then it also ties into this neutral bus bar on the left hand side that is my bond so if anything energizes my grounding system that's going to allow electricity to get over to my neutral system and then i'm going to have free flow electricity enough to go ahead and trip my breakers this is known as a bounce screw sometimes we're going to see a bond strap in here as well that's this item down here so that bound strap again goes into the nutribus bar ties to my box any electrical wires that come loose and energized um [Music] i see that mark i'm gonna bring that up in a second anything that's tied to both um anything that ties the bolt again are going to go ahead and connect it so if any energized connection conductors come loose energize my box then that's going to go ahead and energize my neutral wire all right we do have one question up here and let's see if i could pop this on here and it doesn't want to play nice to me all right so one of the questions mark asked if the water pipes aren't used for grounding then is it still important to jump past the water meter and the answer is going to be yes because even if the water pipes aren't used to it if i have um and especially in our area if i have a water meter there it's very common so the utility companies are going to be expecting to use that as well if the utility companies such as the phone company cable company satellite dish they all have to ground their items as well so they may be going ahead and grounding to the plumbing pipes they may go ahead and ground to the meter box outside whatever it is the expectation is there that those items are grounded and not only that but if somebody is outside we and they're going to be touching the plumbing pipes inside and something's disconnected we want to make sure because all those pipes are metallic i'll even go one step further you know we should actually be bonding our water pipes to our gas pipes in some communities they do that but in many communities they don't and the whole idea there is again if somebody touches a gas pipe because they usually run right by the water pipes if they touch both of those we don't want them to be different potential this is a push manic panel and some panels are really difficult to be able to find that bottom screw that's not always going to be that big fat green screw or that bonding strap that we saw earlier this one here where that arrow is pointing that's actually my my bond screw it goes through the neutral bust bar which is all those screws above it and it goes into the panel in the back um there's going to be a schematic unless it got pulled away or damaged or whatever there should be i should say a schematic on every panel that shows the neutral bus bars the breaker bus bars and on there you're going to be looking for a phrase on there that says bond when required and it's going to be pointing to a certain hole or slot that screw needs to be filled in there now we're not going to know if they put the right screw in there somebody could have put the wrong screw and it doesn't go all the way through we're not going to back these things out and verify it but we should be able to verify that most likely it is there in this case on the pushmatics that little screw there to the right of the uh gec that's going to be my bond screw that comes in there here's our typical water meter this is a lead service main coming in here as we come up you can see i have my gec my grounding electro conductor it does have insulation on it so the insulation is stripped back that wire is not cut remember i said there's no we're not allowed to cut or splice this gec at all all right so it's not cut but the insulation is stripped back that strap that's on there connects it to my conduit and it also connects makes a solid connection to my water pipes on the street side of the meter again the connection where the wire is fed underneath there the insulation is stripped away but it's not cut and then we jump over to the left side of the meter something else too just throwing this out there that tamper wire on that water meter you know i kind of look for those you many times you're going to find a tag on there where it's like a 500 750 or a thousand dollar fine if that tamper wire is cut um and i can't tell you how many times actually i would guess to be around 20 so one out of every five i find where either that tampa wire is missing or it's cut some communities don't require it and some do all right but i would still let my client be aware of it this way they're not going to get stuck in case for some reason a meter reader comes inside and sees that that's missing but for us in this class we're talking about the gec that gec in this case is probably about 100 amp service because that looks like a number six copper wire and it needs to go to the street cider meter and jump over the meter this one here same thing we connect it we're on the street side but we don't have a jumper wire coming back all right so here's another view of the same picture our water lines coming in we're connected to the street side but i don't see anything that is taking it from this side of the meter over to this side of the meter and we should have some sort of a jumper and also remember what i said about the the tamper wire this one was also cut i think this is a great practice as well i'm seeing it more and more communities which i'm pretty happy with so they'll jump over or bond both the hot and cold water side of the water heater usually i'm seeing that that same wire will continue on and go to that gas pipe that's to the left so they'll put all three of these together and make sure they're all the same potential and again if somebody has to switch out this water heater once you remove that water heater you break all the bonds of those different items not to mention we got dielectric unions on the water heater as well so these dielectric unions that you see down here um those have little plastic pieces that separate that in there so i really don't even have a connection to my water heater at this point in time the electrical potential and all the connected metal parts needs to be the same as the earth plain and simple anything that's different we're going to take a chance for electricity to flow through a human being we don't want that to happen so we need to maintain that we're properly grounded so that we keep that zero potential all right lightning strike same thing i want to give a pathway for that electricity to get into the earth um sub-panels all right and this is another important one we do not want to combine or bond our grounding system to our neutral system in a subpanel we should have separate grounding um conductors and separate neutral conductors when we come through it the reasoning goes back to the amperage not disappearing so if i'm inviting amperage to go on the neutral then we'll get back to the slides that show that a little more clearly in fact here it is let's start building it and then we'll talk about it so i got an energized conductor on a breaker phase a i go ahead and connect it to my bus bar and my subpanel i take phase b connect that to my bus bar on the other side so now my panel's got a 240 panel on the right side i'm using the disconnects in the bottom of the left panel in order to make all this happen i run a separate neutral wire everything is good at this point in time i'm going to bond and ground my main panel at that point in time so i just popped the bond up there and right before that i put the gec in there now i have a regular electric circuit we have a hot and a neutral going to it i'm still in a conduit system so my conduit will be my grounding system we're going to keep everything separate at this point in time all right so energy goes in through the hot comes back on the neutral the amperage is still flowing on the neutral neutral goes up and out no problems normal conditions nothing no problem whatsoever to see here so now what we do is we're going to throw a bond on the subpanel and again this is going to be under normal circumstances that's happening here so what we're going to do is energize that outlet again so we're going to be doing work amperage does not disappear so we're going to energize our our energized conductor and then amperage will be on the neutral amperages or electricity is going to flow in any means possible all right so yes it is going to flow on the neutral no doubt on that but because i'm bonded there as well i'm putting a connection to my electrical panel electricity is also going to be flowing on my electrical panel as well all right so now i'm going to have amperage where everywhere between as long as electricity is flowing and how much amperage is being used i'm going to have amperage on my conduit system between the panel and the sub panel for whatever is being used and if somebody touches that and something else that's zero then they can go ahead and start creating um an ulterior flow and they can actually get themselves shocked or electrocuted all right so having that secondary bond i'm sorry just it's not good all right plain and simple now either way with or without the bound if i had that ground fault and everything else was connected all right i would still be good so here we're showing a phase the case fault energizing my case energizing my panel energizing my conduit energizing the other case energizing my bond and that gets my power to the neutral free flow electricity my breaker is going to go ahead and trip this is all good so it's not going to harm us there but the biggest problem is we're inviting electricity under normal usage not under a fault usage all right on ground rods if we do use ground rods um and it is acceptable and there's some areas they they only want that if you have a single ground rod that's being used then there needs to be an ohm test all right it has to have some has to allow for a certain amount of resistance that needs to be done and it's it's a little bit of a process cost a few bucks it has to be done in the presence of the inspector at least i think it does um bottom line is nobody likes to do that it's simpler and easier just to go ahead and purchase two ground rods instead of one as long as you have two ground rods in the earth then you do not have to do an ohm test but the same rules apply all right now here we're coming out of the meter panel and most likely this is going to be on a well system so my bond is going to be located in that meteor panel or i have a main disconnect outside and then this is going to be a common setup that gec is going to go to my first ground rod again no splices we strip away the insulation we attach it to it all right and then we're gonna go ahead and go to my second one on there sorry about that and now the wire goes down into the earth and it's going to connect to another one that's going to be about six feet away all right um me i just think it's a great idea you know there's nothing bad about having too many connections to the earth you know we just don't want to have different connections to our electrical system at different locations all right we want to keep all those separate or all coming from the same point basically so this is just another connection for our water pipes this is the chicago ground that i talked about comes out of the electrical panel goes to the closest water meter if we have a plastic water feed coming in here this is not going to do us any good whatsoever all right i would still try and get some sort of connection for these water pipes to still be part of the grounding system so i would still go ahead and get them connected to it but we're not going to be connected to the earth all right so more or less we're bonding the plumbing system to the ground rods outside to the ground system so they all stay the same potential gfis a couple of different rules on these and gfi stands for ground fault interrupt um you'll hear the term gfci ground fault circuit interrupt i really don't care which one you use um you know shorter four letters whatever it is what it is um these are designed to protect people they're not really designed to protect property breakers they're limiting amperage that's flowing so wires don't overheat they're designed to protect property gfis if electricity is going anywhere that it's not supposed to go these will sense that and they'll turn the power off immediately all right now i always get mixed up and how fast these things are supposed to work i know i've used terms of 1 50th of a second but 140th is the right number and it's up here but that's just fast you know 140th of a second is almost instantaneous we did a couple of tests on on gfis and i remember we had a light bulb that was we had hooked up to a ground rod outside so we created a ground fault basically and the ground connectors and water services all right so i got a question did you cover wire sizing for grounding electrode conductors either by rod or by water pipe and the answer was yes i did um so the gec whether it goes to a water pipe or to a ground rod the gec has to either be a number six copper and that's for under 150 amps or a number two copper for 150 amps and over so number six for under 150 amps on number two if it's 150 or more all right getting back to the gfcis they need to trip off quick we set up our sample we put a ground rod out in the middle of the yard we connect our neutral wire to that we put that to the neutral side of a light bulb we ran a hot wire to a switch and then to switch to the hot side of the light bulb and we had that hooked up to a gfci outlet all right we flipped that switch and as soon as we flipped that switch that gfi tripped we couldn't even get it to uh flash we couldn't get it to even blink you know as soon as we flip it we're here to click on the outlet it's that quick so basically hardly any power at all is going to be going through these things um 5 milliamps difference that's all it takes all i have to do is lose five milliamps of power and that's going to be enough to cause these um whether it's the breaker or the outlet cause the gfci to trip all right basically it checks for an imbalance between the hot and neutral this works on the same principle let me bring up the next slide um this works on the same principle that i mentioned earlier that it expects uh it expects the amperage that's on the energized conductor to be identical to the amperage that's on the neutral conductor all right so i'm gonna switch cameras here and i should have cleaned up while i had the chance maybe all right let me go ahead and get rid of my mess here [Music] okay so let's say i got and i i need you to use a little bit of imagination here so even though i'm drawing on the whiteboard i want you to picture this as a bird's eye view so we're looking at a table coming straight down here all right so as i look down i drill a hole in the table and i run a single electrical wire that's what the red data is coming through here and this way here north is pointing up at this point in time all right if i put four compasses around this wire and this wire right now is not powered up all those compasses are going to be pointing north because again the earth is a gigantic electromagnetic generator we have a north pole in the south pole then we're going to go to the positive side of the earth which is the north pole and that's where they're all going to be pointing at but now if i have this single wire all by itself and now i energize it all right so now it's got power coming through it and there's no neutral wire that comes in here all of these compasses are now going to be aimed at that wire that wire is creating an electromagnetic field that comes in there all right that's basically what this and i'm going to switch back that's basically what we're looking at in this diagram here that ring where the two wires go through senses for that electromagnet field that's being created all right now going back to the drawing that i had before if i took a neutral wire and i twisted it together and i kept it back in there all those compasses would point back to north again that neutral wire would cancel itself out all right so as we're looking at this diagram and this is a gfci it is in use it's closed so power is on and everything's normal all right so we see energized power coming in it's going to its load load is wherever the work is being done all right and we said amperage does not disappear so if two amps goes in on the hot and two amps go out on the neutral i am creating a zero magnetic field in that ring all right let's go on to the next one so now we're showing that i have some sort of a ground fault all right so same things i got energized conductor coming in two amps is going in one amp is going to the earth and remember it could be as small as point five of a milliamp all right or 5 milliamp coming in there electricity is going someplace it doesn't it's it doesn't not supposed to go these gfis don't know where it's going all right they just know it's not coming back on the neutral now i have an imbalance between my heart and my neutral when there's that imbalance those compasses now because i'm creating an electromagnetic field at this point in time that sensor will sense that and instantly open up that circuit turn the hot turn the electricity off to that circuit and then turn the power off so as long as the power is off nobody gets hurt all right if the power's still on then people get hurt all right and a lot of people say well what about these testers don't they um let me go back to that one there what about these testers don't they um you know just trip the mechanism and that's it they don't all right if you look at the routing from where the test button is you can see that as we start you know right here at this dot we're going to go through when we test that button and we're going to come back and we're this resistor is going to allow 0.5 of a milliamp so it's going to be the bare bones minimum and it's going to bring it outside that ring this ring is supposed to sense that difference and open up the breaker and turn the power off so those test buttons don't just flip the switch they actually create an internal ground fault in there same thing with our testers all right and that's another clue if you press that test button the gfi could be bad they do go bad but they might also have a bootleg ground in there all right so if we're going ahead and taking the electricity and putting it on the ground and then the ground is putting it back on the neutral it might not be able to sense that all right so if it trips with the button we know the gfi itself is working but we may not have the proper connections inside that outlet as well and that works for everything downstream so line and load couple more words that i guess we should know line side anything that goes towards where the power is coming in from that's the line side doesn't matter where i draw my line at you know in this case we're going to take that gfi outlet anything to the power source is the line side of that outlet anything to where the work is being done is going to be to the load side of that outlet where that gfi is going to measure the amperage in all those outlets everything that's on the load side including itself when it's when it's measuring the amperage right so let's say that the gfi outlet at the top is using i don't know i'm just gonna make up numbers two amps and then so this one will be a two all right and then the bottom one there is going to be another two and then this one will be a one and this one will be a three amps all right that all these things are using um so that would be a total what four or five eight amps all right so that gfi knows that eight amps is going out eight amps should come back in so even though all those outlets to the right are not actual gfi outlets they are gfi protected these outlets or breakers will protect everything on the load side of them including themselves arc faults and arc fault circuit interrupters first thing i think before we talk on these it should be known that the city of chicago is not um mandating that our fault circuit interrupters be installed all right most of the suburbs at least i'm not aware of any of the suburbs in chicago or anyplace else in the state of illinois and you know i hope you understand i do not know every single code in every single part of this state or country all right so if some of them are following suit of chicago that may be true but not everybody or city of chicago itself does not require arc fault circuit interrupters the rationale is everything is inconduited they have some of the safest electricity in the entire nation i believe they're actually accurate and the amount of damage that could be caused by these things they feel that it's limited so they don't want to spend the extra money and undo cost to go ahead and put them in there it's their choice and i'm going to respect it plain and simple so what an arc fault does it tends to provide protection from the effects of an arc arc fault so basically it recognizes that sine wave and when something is going a little haywire hokey with it all right um i think it's safe to say there's two types of arcs when we're dealing with our electrical system all right what are we saying arc is a discharge of electric current across the gap so anytime electricity is traveling through the air basically that is an arc when it comes to it a lightning strike is an arc all right if two wires are close enough together and it's sparking across those that's an arc all right it's a discharge of electricity um parallel arcs can get extremely hot but even a series arcs can get up there as well it all depends on the load and how long they're going it's a spark all right any type of spark can go ahead and create some sort of a fire so it expels metals when you see these things and hopefully they'll evaporate right so two different arcs i want you to be aware of series arcs and parallel arcs all right series arcs are typically going to be the energized conductor all right so if there's a nick in it or a separation of the wire itself and still enough to go ahead and get sparking so electricity is still going to flow that arc is only going to be as powerful as the load that's being used on it so if i have 120 watt light bulb being used on this and this series arc then at 120 volts pressure it's one amp that arc is going to be basically one amp all right the more electricity that i use the more powerful that spark or that arc is going to be whereas parallel arc that's going to be my energized conductor and my neutral conductor and this is what we mostly see when they start getting smushed together and getting close enough together then they're going to want to start creating a short circuit or a phase to neutral fault you know when it comes with it so how this happens um because we know we have conductors we have insulators around the conductors and then with extension cords basically i got two conductors both of them have insulation in them then i got another sheath that wraps the whole thing together if i keep stepping and standing on that sheathing and i just keep squeezing it and breaking it i mean if you think about over time i'm going to be damaging the insulation on the conductors themselves and the sheathing with it as well and if i just keep squeezing and squeezing and squeezing it and it gets weaker and weaker electricity is going to eventually want to start making its way through the insulation once it gets damaged and it's going to start creating a parallel arc at that point in time now if it's bare bones metal on metal then we're going to have an unlimited flow of electricity and most likely my breaker will trip but before i get to that point i might just have a breakdown on installation so i might only have 20 amps on a 20 amp breaker that's jumping across these things and it's constantly making sparks and then all of a sudden it actually ignites the insulation or if it sparks and gets to an opening in a junction box or an electrical panel then that could get to the wood structures of the properties and i know most of us look for holes in electrical panels and outlet boxes and stuff like that and i think a lot of people explain to you look for the holes so that you're worried about people sticking their fingers in there and um you know really i've never heard of anybody sticking their finger inside of a an electrical panel and getting shocked um what i have seen with my own eyes is that we create an arc or a fault inside this we create an arc and sparks start flying inside those panels or inside of a switch box and those holes are missing now those sparks get out of that panel because those panels are designed to contain any sort of blast or arc or fault that happens inside of them but if those holes are missing now it gets out of there if i got insulation wood anything else there's a chance that it could start the structure of the house on fire and and that's where it comes with it so simply making sure that all those openings are filled it's a easy thing to fix and it's an easy thing to look for and granted you know i get it the planets have to be in alignment i got to have a hole i gotta it's gotta be enough to where it ignites the wood um i got a hatch of an ark but that stuff has happened and it's happened you know enough times which is why we make sure all these things are sealed and quite frankly i think it's a pretty pretty cool thing that we get to do because we get into everybody's housing inventory in the entire state of illinois and for simple little plugs or fill ins we could do everything to keep those sparks from getting out but anyway i'm jumping on a soap box i do want you know difference between a series and a parallel series is one hot wire coming apart parallel is the hot and the neutral pushing together all right series less likely current load is limited because of whatever the work is being done series arcing cannot be greater than the current of the low but it still produces fire it can still create a spark it still produces love it still sparks any way you look at it series are series arcing did not develop enough thermal energy to create a fire i disagree with this statement plain and simple uh parallel arcing they are the most dangerous that much i'll get unlimited energy until the breaker is turned off a parallel arc is created by a short circuit or ground fault something that's going to go ahead and start getting everything to be um getting the the insulation on the conductors rune now that that could be whether it's a an extension cord or here we're using non-metallic cable or romex anything that could go ahead and damage it so here i got a lamp cord going through a doorway every time the doorway closes it's going to keep pinching that lamp cord wearing away at the insulation until eventually it's going to create something that can go ahead and ignite that whole thing here this is just a drawing i got off of i think it was this old house or something like that but nails going through non-metallic cable and they can also start creating some sort of arc fault underneath there as well um this i think is a little excessive you know again it was this homeowners talk about safety of which but if you take something that is grounded so that drill that he has in there so the bits everything else that has a ground plug tied into it now he goes into the energized conductor of that wire you're going to be creating a short circuit and you're going to get sparks flowing all right um mostly what we're going to end up seeing is the damage of the insulation that comes through and that's what we're looking at here all right so different electrical materials and where they can be used um kind of a short subject here this is going a lot quicker than i thought so we're going to be finishing up in probably about a half hour or so just to give you an idea so the first thing is emt also known as thin wall also known as conduit emt stands for electrical metallic tubing this stuff is bendable and usually we just get it and we can pull the wires through it doesn't come with wires inside of it i do want you to look at some of the fasteners that are present on here um these fasteners you know such as this one right here these are compression fittings the compression fittings are only supposed to be used outside what i'm going to circle in blue here the ones with these screw fittings to tighten everything up those are not to be used outside those are indoors only all right but the other ones are true so depending on the size of the conduit and the pipes um i'll take terms how many wires and what size wires that we can pull through there quite frankly we don't really notice too many problems with this um it's gonna be really difficult to pull too many wires through this stuff you're gonna end up damaging the wires so once it comes through we see them damaged those are usually the things that we end up calling out but it is it can be done you can't pull too many through it and then the pipes themselves are gonna be hot for those that use thermal imagers inside the panels i think it's a great idea see if which wires are hot that could tell you if we're either overloading or too much bundling or if we have loose connections just a nice simple thing we could do doesn't have to be foolproof 100 emt so emt could be used interior and exterior exterior has to be watertight fittings that are compression ones it is acceptable as a ground um but this is this is a big deal so we don't have to have a ground wire inside of them now there is a push for this to to have ground wires installed with conduit and the reasoning behind this is and i'm sure we've all seen it is if that conduit comes loose i just i just broke my ground for everything downstream of that or everything on the work side all right so this is my line side on on this side and then this is my load side all right and on the load side i had a wire come loose and energize my conduit if my conduit is disconnected i don't have a pathway to get back to my panel that gets me back to my bottom screw that gets me on my neutral and allows that free flow electricity and trip to breaker i got nothing all i'm going to do is energize that conduit and everything else that's attached to that conduit is going to be energized as well all right so the conduit is more than just protecting the wire and just the convenience of pulling wires through it that's my ground path all right so making sure that those are connected i can't stress that enough without it if i do have a phase-to-case fault on the load side there's no way for me to trip the breaker everything's going to be energized and if somebody touches that and they have another ground path whether they're barefoot on the concrete or water or touching plumbing pipes the electricity will flow through them all right beds need to be made smooth no kinks um secure three feet from the box ten foot intervals chicago seven i don't really get into that i just don't want to see these things loose i'll go ahead and wiggle them when i come through it not acceptable where flexible connection is needed such as to a motor okay so in other words if we have to be able to move something then we have to have something that's flexible for that connection is what he's saying not acceptable to connect to lay in fluorescent lights um because we don't know and what they were talking about is fluorescent lights in a drop ceiling we don't know where those are going to land so they need to be moved a little bit so we usually end up putting six foot whips on those so we can have access to it if we go straight to it and we need to take that down we're not going to be able to move that light fixture to get in there and fix or replace it so we need to have that flexible conduit there coupling connections mock nuts everything should be tight everything should be secured again goes back to losing that ground that we had on there um it's okay to be buried in concrete or earth provided proper fittings are used and the pipe is protected against corrosion all right so this one ended up getting twisted and pulled apart um even though they're still touching so i still may have my ground path coming back in there it's still not good enough for me all right if those things are are loose and they could come apart that's definitely something we should call out this one's completely apart we can see that we have the red wire and the white wire in there so we have our energized conductor we have our neutral coming back but because my conduit is disconnected if i get a phase-to-case fault anywhere downstream of this it just gets energized and i don't have a pathway to come back all right uh bx all right bx or armor cable they have the wires already built into them so this comes from the manufacturer like this all right um those little red heads that you see on there and let's see if i can just because i'm having fun drawing on here right now those little red head there they go on the tips of these things they're designed to protect the wires from being cut from the actual cabling device themselves all right the extra wire that's in there that isn't really a separate ground wire we kind of tie everything together to give us our grounding system but there's also not going to be an extra ground wire in there as well so the armor cable these are in short whips five feet we should be able to see that bare metal piece and i'm talking about this piece way up there all right we should be able to see that folded over and and fold it back so that we know that everything's kind of connected and we have one continuity to everything coming across let's see some of the rules connectors are straight or 90 degrees and those are those fasteners that we put on there the connectors are not concealed so we can't bury any junction boxes with these we can fish these wires behind walls we could do that actually in chicago now so we don't have to pull off all the drywall to run new electrical stuff there we can actually fish the armor cable but what we can't do is hide those connectors all right sheathing is the ground no ground wires in the cable the metal thin strip is not a ground wire but we want that bending back invisible paper wrap around the conductors um that's flame and moisture retardant that's just to keep them somewhat dry auntie short is that redheaded bushing that i talked about so it doesn't get damaged by the conduit itself all right so we can't let it be subject to physical damage in other words somebody can't drive over it it can't be exposed in a garage or someplace where people can step on it or hang on it or whatever you can fish it in there if it's run on the other side of the joist it needs to be secured to each floor joist if it's going against a wall four and a half feet 12 inches from a junction box that 12 inches is also the same thing for non-metallic cable we'll get to that in a little bit uh whatever the thickness is determines how fast i could bend it but quite frankly if you bend these things too much then they're just going to start breaking and coming apart so bx uh what else we got here it can be unsupported if it's laying loose on top stuff or running behind a wall less than our lengths two feet or less at the termination points where flexibility is needed this is where we were talking about those can lights and drop ceilings or fluorescent lights anything where i need to be able to remove something and move it around that's what it is and really it's six feet is our magic number that i want to be aware of all right mc cable is kind of the same thing as armor cable when it comes with it um these again open and conceal direct burial when protected branch circular signal similar to the bx armor cable secure it every six feet and bending radius is seven times wires are built into it they do have a plastic wrap on it sheathing is not the ground on these so i don't know if you caught it or not but there was a separate ground wire in there um and that would need to be attached to whatever boxes that we have all right the green ground wire present it must be used all right greenfield um these these are basically flexible conduit all right uh liquid tight seal tight you know even though those have a rubber coating on it outside its flexible conduit that comes in there now certain jurisdictions like chicago and i was actually you know thinking the wrong way on this one for quite a long time and i do believe it says so in this drawing here that these can be gone in unlimited lanes but greenfield cannot all right quite frankly if you ever try to pull wires through this stuff you're never going to get more than 20 feet anyway but it still falls under the same rules about five feet when you're going to be doing it but you can run it and fish it under the walls not really the most common thing that people are going to be using just because of the size of it all right so depending on how you're using it is whether or not you have to run a separate ground wire through this but for the most part the green field can be used as your grounding conductor all right so not to be used for subject to industry within a foot from the box every four feet fishing is okay and it's unsupported when you fish it behind stuff six feet connections minimum size is half inch this is the unlimited length like i said in chicago i don't think that's accurate longer than six feet we do need a ground wire um installed under six feet no ground wire and most of the time when we're dealing with gfis or i'm sorry when we're dealing with greenfield we're going to try and keep those under six feet any length or any circuit over 20 amps also needs a ground wire they do have 90 degree angle connectors those cannot be concealed what else not permitted on the ground or embedded in concrete and this is the seal type version of the liquid tight that comes in here all right and seal tight is a trait name where it comes to it typically most of our air conditioning circuits are going to be put in this way now realize that this the seal tight also comes without that metal conduit right and so what i what i tend to do is squeeze it if i can pinch it then there is no ground wires coming in there there is no protection of my wires to it all right so i definitely need a ground wire coming into it and that's not acceptable for our outdoor situations all right it can be buried if it's marked and listed for this not to be used for subject to industry one foot from the box four feet every linear run um does not need to be secured when flexibility is needed in lengths up to three feet okay and this is um and this just has to do with the size the wires how many amperes that goes on there if it's okay for a ground or not on ground and again it has to do with the amperage um and the size of the wires you know what you can never go wrong with throwing another ground wire in there anyway but we want to be as accurate as possible so knowing that this chart here 25 amps or more over six feet um it's not okay as a ground 15 or 20 amps up to six feet you can use it as a ground so anything over 25 amps we should have a ground wire going in there and this again goes towards our feeds for our air conditioning units and this is what we're looking at here so here our seal tight actually came loose i've run into connections for the seal tight or liquid tight where the connections themselves are plastic and i'm talking about you know this nut right there where that thing's plastic and which case if it is then i don't have even if it is connected i don't have my um i can't use it as a ground at all you know because the plastic will break the ground and go into the air conditioning unit so i have two energized conductors in here and i do have one ground conductor in there there is not a neutral conductor going through this but again if it feeds my air conditioning units i don't have to have that non-metallic cable i also want you to know the term nm cable and m stands for non-metallic nmc stands for non-metallic cable all right also known as romex romex is a trade name it's the manufacturer's name but a lot of people do refer to that i like us to refer to things as being non-metallic cable or nmcs this one would be a 14 2 with ground all right so not metallic cables they started color coding them older systems i want to say in the 70s maybe i'm sorry in the early 2000s is when they started color coding these things and so white would be 14 yellow would be 12 and orange would be 10 when we're dealing with non-metallic cables and then when they say the first number is going to be the size the second number will be the number of conductors and then the third thing is whether or not it has a ground with it or not so this would be a 14 which is the size two conductors hot neutral and ground i can actually use this to connect an air conditioning system all right it's okay to use the white wire as an energized connector we should re-label it as black so putting tape on it is good but it can be done okay for use on one or two family dwellings in any height suspended ceilings you know it's not so much in the city of chicago and the suburbs around here we kind of do everything in conduit and we don't really use non-metallic cable you can run it on the ground too they have uv protection and stuff outside like that and those are all color coded as well 12 inches four and a half feet no limit on length it can be fished it doesn't have to be supported when you fish it six feet basically the same rules as greenfield type nm is not okay for direct burial we do have to protect it from physical injury so basically anything that's below seven feet that's exposed um needs to be in pipe all right or behind drywall it just can't be out in the open it's not intended to be used to connect garbage disposals so those wires under the sinks because we're going to be going in there we could bump things on it we could damage it and that's why we're not supposed to use it for that cannot run perpendicular cross-basement joist needs to be on a linear running board number eight or larger so they have to have something especially up in annex and you're going to see this all the time when you when you go up in an attic they don't want you to be able to walk on these wires and squish them because once we start squishing and damaging that we're going to be damaging the insulation and we can start creating a parallel arc when it happens so parallel on joists is okay what else protected by conduit when passing through floors not always happening so here we can see we come out of our junction box within 12 inches of that box we need to be secured as long as we don't leave away for you know the wires that are loose so when they're going through the the stud then they need to be protected with nailing plates but if they're out in the open like this then they don't have to all right so looking at this chart on here um [Music] i know there's something here that says about an inch and a quarter this is all chicago or all of illinois it's chicago we use a lot of non-metallic cable in central illinois that i know it's pretty much the collar counties in chicago is where this comes into play thanks mark for bringing that up um but as far as non-metallic cable just about everything that you're going to use out there or outside the city of chicago is pretty much going to be nmc in fact just to be really clear other than new york chicago and los angeles everywhere else in the united states of america and i'm talking about the the city itself plus the surrounding verbs in the locale around the city everywhere else in in the united states they all use non-metallic cable for residential buildings right everything for commercial buildings has to be in conduit but residential buildings non-metallic cable is just fine so what you're going to have down there is just fine but they still need to be secured they still need to be supported you know whether it's on every floor joist up against the floor joists if it runs through a hole if it's less than an inch and a quarter i have to have nailing plates on it we still have to protect the wires we can't just leave them all floppy and lucy um for what it's worth you know here they're showing bundling and if you notice where we go through the studs first of all we got those nailing plates that are up there so when the drywall guys go there and start putting screws on everything we don't want them to drive screws into these wires now it looks like our nailing plate is missing on a couple of the 12 gauge wires and 14 gauge wires and i'm talking about this area like right in here um we definitely want to call that out and get something connected to it i think same thing on this one right in here should also have a nailing plate coming through it now the bubbling talks about the amount of cables that are allowed to go through that opening that's on there now i get it the wires on the left-hand side are cable and data i'm all over that you know but even though we still want to have those wires protected however the yellow wires going up there and the white wires those are not all right those are non-metallic electric the bundling of the wires as we're seeing kind of loose in there going down the studs um yeah those that's not so much the problem it's where they go through the holes is where we're going to be concerned because that's ends up squeezing everything and then you get a lot of capacity that comes out of there all right this is something that i've never really seen at all or actually i have i've seen it a couple times but it's really rare um i think a lot of people refer to this as like smurf tube just because it's blue where it comes into it but it's a plastic flexible conduit um it's obviously because it's plastic we can't use it as a ground we need to have a ground wire running through it as well but there's going to be some areas where i guess it's okay you know but we really don't use that up here in the chicago area knob and tube there's a lot of insurance companies now that are not um they don't want to insure homes that have knobben tube wiring in it and it's kind of a big deal when we come through it so but identifying it to me it's a problem i let my clients know i have them check with their insurance companies if we run into it it's not a mandated defect that we tell people because the wires are tin cladded copper that we normally see but this stuff is old you know this is turn of the century 1900 old and um and it's all out in the open there was it was not you know some of it you'll find in conduit as well you know when they merge in newer systems to it but it's all old it was all subject to damage and overheating and we just do things with the plastic insulation so much better so i would continue on asking my client to recommending that they check with their insurance company make sure it's there but nonetheless i'd like you to know some of the rules all right and where they get the names and everything else from all right so up here on the left hand side up there that's a knob all right so the distance on that knob between the between the floor joists there and then the knob where the wire is that's actually one inch all right so when we talk about lifting it up running off of parallel or on the floor joists are on top of stuff you know that's supposed to have a one inch gap all right so the reason why they make those knobs one inch is to maintain that one inch gap so when i see stuff like this coming in here where it's actually resting on the floor joists even though the knob is holding it one inch up top there i'm not maintaining that one inch gap on it as well so parallel runs so we're talking about oops this wire here and this wire there those parallel runs need to be three inches apart they need to be three inches apart anytime wires cross over each other and i'm not necessarily seeing where too much to cross over each other i guess you can make that argument there those need to be one inch apart as well so anytime they go perpendicular i have to have a one inch gap on here parallel three inches minimum and these are all test questions you're probably going to see if you're still taking the state exam so i want you to memorize those numbers three inches across one inch here one inch to the structure and needs to stay away the tubes get their name from where the wires go through the studs so we're going to have a ceramic tube and then the wires go through that so they don't get damaged by the wood itself in case it breaks and again the knobs are going to be those items there splices off of these things um and they are mid-air splices so when we talk about this one first a knob and tube splice um going to another circuit is going to be going to another knob and tube material and that splice is actually pretty unique on how they did it these guys were craftsmen they were artists they were you know unique in their trade basically what they would do is strip the insulation away exposing the conductor on the first one so we're talking about the one that goes through here um and that splice up in there they would strip away that insulation exposing the conductor then they would take the splice and they would wrap the wire around the original conductor and then they would solder that joint together all right then they would just cover it up with electrical tape now the electrical tape at that point in time was a cloth type material they didn't have the plastic shiny electrical tape that we see in today's stores it was just old and dull and cloth-like that came in there so if i saw a knob and tube splice going to another non-tube circuit with cloth jacketed type tape on it i would be convinced or i would assume and i would have a pretty safe assumption i think that that was done at the time by the original electrician and even though i'm still calling out the navitubes of being an issue that particular thing somebody didn't do anything hokey with that's just the way it was done at that point in time but now if i go to the newer stuff down in here and here they're showing they put a non-metallic cable and they spliced into that noventube wiring um now i have new wires that come in here and now i'm trying to splice into the old knob and tube chances are that's not going to be soldered together chances are it's going to be um using the newer electrical tape and quite frankly our knowledge has grown um since the since this electrical system was installed so we can tap off to it they did make ways to do it but all these taps have to be in a junction box all right we don't do mid-air splices in modern electric with non-metallic cable we never did so if i see any sort of nmc or nm cable that goes to another tube that itself is going to end up being a problem so we would want to photograph and document that all right needs protection floor level to seven feet that actually goes the same for any nmc no insulation that's something that i forgot to mention earlier these wires have to be out in the open all right so if they're running inside walls i can't fill those walls up with insulation if they're up in the attic i can't cover them with insulation all right um they do need to have clearances again three inches between themselves or one inch um to a structure part of the surface itself all right parallel to each other and intersecting and when they go over each other it's one inch when they go parallel it's three inches all right you could stack two knobs up when it comes to it so here's our knob there's our one inch and what they would do and i'm talking about this one up here what they would end up doing if they needed another wire that goes on top of it they would actually install another knob directly on top of that knob which would also be another inch up above all right now they took some of these old knobbin tubes and they want to get some more electricity coming in here so now we have a junction box that's the right way to do it all right but if you look carefully and you see a little i think it's a wire coming out of there out of that junction box at the very top it looks like we ran a ground wire and the neutral wire and basically they just brought blank wires coming out of there and i'm hoping we're all realized no you can't do that all right oh they did here's a close-up of it and this is the area that i was talking about right here so that opening is three inches apart and that's where they need to be this is what the old splices end up looking like now when you come off this place right away you don't you know obviously you can't get to that three inches right away um and what they're really talking about is between the hot and the neutral all right so just because it's two neutrals or two hots they can actually be close together like this that's not hurting anything what we don't want to do is uh allow for something to fall over the top of it me personally i think it should be further apart but three inches is what the rule was all right old splice like that this is means that was done a long long time ago so here's a nice picture of our tubes coming through here and our knobs coming on there they're not covered with insulation you can see they did put insulation in the attic but they left our wires free here we're going with either armor cable or green field um once we do something like this we have to be in a box and that's about enough on the navin tube all right square d breakers and more so we're going back into the panels a little bit one of the usual suspects that we find doing home inspections are double taps i want to say just about everyone that we see is going to have two wires under a lug all right and sometimes it's okay and sometimes it's not okay all right so i'm pretty sure there's other breakers out there that are designed to carry multiple wires under one screw but right now the only ones that i ever see are the square d breakers all right and i'm gonna go to the next slide first and this is the side view of the square d so these have two plates on it and then the screw the screw actually pushes down on that plate so this particular breaker again this is the square d1 this particular breaker is designed to carry two wires all right but it's only designed to carry one wire on each side of that screw if we go back to the other slide we could see on this one they put both wires on one side of the screw that it is not designed to do all right so you could put one on each side it is designed to hold that but not one or not two on the same side and again square d is the only one i'm aware of that does this all right now this code here is actually changing um in canada they had it for a long time that switches and outlets all needed to be um either three or five feet away from the tubs all right and the unit in the united states they just couldn't be in the tub all right so here the question was an electrical switch must be at least three feet away from the bathtub the tower originally that was false 406.8 says it can't be in the shower space all right but this is changing and this is going to be adopted by more and more municipalities as time goes on and they are going to be pushing that three-foot rule to keep it away from the tub i honestly don't know how they're going to get around some of these things unless you know they they separate obviously it's got to go tub is always going to have to be in the back wall somewhere then you're going to have to have the toilet in the sink in order to get that space but it is changing all right so here in this diagram the outlet is actually inside of it and that cannot be in the plane once you cross the plane it's bad all right this is on the outside you know and again it just can't be inside the plane anything near our water sources should be gfi's and i didn't really talk about that all that much um gfis are easy to install they're cheap you know a handyman could really do it it's light electric where it comes to it um but anything outside nowadays anything in the garage anything in an unfinished basement kitchens bathrooms those items should all be gfi protected all right plain and simple this wasn't a i haven't seen joe in a while this is a great guy i'm not even sure if he's still a home inspector and but he came to our program a long time ago and we were looking at a foreclosed house and somebody decided to put a shower in the bathroom and we got an outlet obviously inside the shower that's kind of a no-brainer all right this one we saw earlier anytime i overload the neutrals and it is possible to overload neutrals if i'm sharing that neutral and they're both on the same phase i can easily run too much electricity than what it's designed to carry and also if those wires are loose they will create a series arc and they will that arc will cause the insulation to melt and burn you know just like this so there's more than one reason i guess is where i'm going all right something unusual that we may see is locks on circuit breakers um a lot of municipalities are requiring fire alarm sprinkler systems smoke alarm systems all of them to be in the locked on position all right now you're probably thinking well if it's locked in the opposition and that thing won't let it move because every time i see a trip breaker it's actually moved to the middle position and i i can relate to that i can understand it but rest assured this breaker will still trip should there be a need for it to trip so if i have an overload fault a direct short or some sort of ground fault and unbounded properly that breaker will trip so having locks on them is a good thing and even you know they have locked out tag out kits and now it shouldn't be locked in the off position um if it is chances are good there might be somebody working on a system somewhere and he locked it off so that it's nobody can turn it on by accident i would obviously investigate that if somebody worked on something such a air conditioner system they locked it out they forgot about it they're not there anymore then when your client goes use the air conditioning system it's not going to operate because it's locked in the opposition but i think that's rare and i've never seen anything like that this is using disconnects or anything that had a separate fuse in it you know if they're going to go ahead and run copper pipes obviously that's not going to work as a fuse and that's going to create its own problems itself over fusing this is the math that comes with it and i'd like you to go back to that chart that we wrote earlier um and that chart is pretty much going to be our rule of thumb all right so certain appliances not all appliances but certain appliances we can overfuse and and it's still safe all right now this is a rule of thumb all right what we don't want to do is rely on this to be a steadfast rule that comes into play but let's take the central air conditioning systems and for us in in in residential home inspections where we're going to seal refusing is typically going to be the central air conditioning system well pumps and electric radiant baseboard heat well pumps we're not going to see the data plate so we're just not going to know what the what size wire and what size breaker it calls for electric radiant heat not always are you going to see that either all right you have to start taking things apart dismantling them and we really don't do that to see it but air conditioning systems on the other hand you can see those all right and we can take a picture of that data plate that's on there so the shortcut if we remember we had our amperage written first and then we had our copper conductors and our aluminum conductors so 15 amps was a 14 gauge 12 amps i'm 15 amps was uh 14 gauge 20 amps was a 12 gauge 30 amps was a 10 gauge 8 gauge or 50 amps went all the way up to an 8 gauge so the rule of thumb for us is we whatever wire we have there and it's only specific to those dedicated circuits all right once i start mixing circuits i can't do this any longer it's only when it's dedicated and it's pretty much what we want to do is avoid nuisance trips we know that when an appliance starts up there's going to be a heavy draw and we want to let that draw happen and then everything's going to back down where it's going to be normal all right we can't guarantee that when we have multiple items connected to the same circuit so this is only for dedicated things so what we're saying here the best rule of thumb is you go to the next size larger wire and whatever breaker you could put on that wire is pretty much what you could have this wire protected at so if i had a number 10 copper wire which is typically going to be on a 30 amp breaker i would take the next size larger wire which is a number eight and that chart that i wrote up before that number eight says i can go all the way up to a 50 amp breaker so in this situation is it okay the answer is yes all right you could have a number 10 wire on a 50 inch breaker however what this rule of thumb you know like i said it's pretty much only going to be for well pumps or it's going to be for electric radiant heat and there's no way for us to verify that with air conditioning units and we could see the data plate we should be able to tell what size wire that calls for and what size breakers should be on there all right so here they allow us to be 175 percent over but we can't exceed 225 all right this term here and this is our second the last slide we'll throw one more up there and we're going to end this um this one here i refer to this as top load all right so we got a 100 amp breaker and so the red striped wire has a single 100 amp breaker the black wire has a 100 amp breaker that comes in there they're tied together all right so even though we have two wires and each one has is on 100 amp breakers again we do not add these up this is still a 100 amp service that comes in there those breakers will allow up to 100 amps to flow all right whether they're flowing at 120 volts or 240 volts doesn't necessarily matter it's going to allow 100 amps to flow the problem now comes in with that black and white wire that's tied in off the top of this so those wires also are only designed to carry 100 amps but now if those wires we don't know what they're hooked up to but let's say they're hooked up to something that's going to allow 50 amps to flow now i'm going to be able to allow up to 150 amps to flow down those wires that are only designed to carry 100 amps those wires should be after the main breaker and not before the main breaker this main breaker is not going to be able to sense how much electricity is flowing before it it only knows what's flowing through it so if those wires are top loaded like this we're not going to have the luxury of having that breaker protected and we can overheat our wires all right last thing i want to chat on is can lights [Music] and then we'll wrap it up and i hope this all helped you a little bit so if you do have any questions anything i chatted about now's a good time to start typing them in there so i could address them all right so there's two different types of can lights now the one we're looking at here is what they call non ic rated can lights so ic stands for insulation contact that means if it's non ic that means that insulation cannot touch this can light typically they're painted white not always but typically they're painted white if we're lucky and we see them then you could see the old sticker right on there that says hey you know you have to have two inches or three inches of space around this can light to make it now they do make boots that go ahead and keep the cam lights and i've seen people put boxes around it to keep the insulation from getting around it but these are pretty drafty as well and if you have these can lights up in an attic or an unconditioned space you're going to have a tremendous amount of heat loss coming up through there because this opening down here at the bottom i couldn't get down there sorry that opening down there at the bottom that's clear and through you'll actually see light shining through there same thing where this pipe comes through so once those bulbs start getting hot heat just goes up into the attic and once we start heating our attic and then we are asking for a lot of other problems such as ice damping moisture everything else that's going up in there not to mention it can't dissipate the heat of these things so we don't want the insulation touching it all right i see ready cam lights are typically going to be silver or unpainted um that doesn't mean that they all are they're you know it is what it is and not always can you tell the difference without seeing a label that's on there all right um if you put a can light like this in between um the first floor and the second floor so we're going to first floor ceiling and you don't have any insulation between the first and second floor that's what they're designed for that's fine all right but once we start putting them in attics or ceilings uh where the attic above it is an unconditioned space now we're asking for trouble and um yeah this is not a good idea i don't know so white is typically going to be non-ic silver is going to be typically ic rated and i think that's all i got for you there is more things with electricity we could talk about but i am actually losing my voice right now and i'm just going to call it a wrap and then i think i'll get some of the interior stuff on another day so for those of you that are here i want to thank you and that is that you

Channel: International Association of Certified Home Inspectors (InterNACHI)

Views: 25,401

Keywords: International association of certified home inspectors, InterNACHI, NACHI, become a home inspector, home inspection training, home inspection education, gromicko, electrical, electric inspection, electrical inspection

Id: _fvMzt0fUZI

Length: 191min 40sec (11500 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 14 2021