Electrical Outlet Basics | How To Wire

hey what's up you guys it's Scott with everyday home repairs and today we are going to talk about how to wire and some of the common issues that people run into when they're wiring standard electrical outlet first up is always safety when dealing with any sort of electrical system and that is to make sure you're cutting power to the box by hitting your circuit breaker or pulling the fuse and then also basic tools so the basic tool that should be in your toolbox before doing a project like this would be a voltage tester this one's made by Cline tools I've had it for years it's awesome so it just as a basic detector and then this one's nice because it has a small light which come in comes in pretty handy when you're cutting power and maybe cutting the lights to area where now you can see what you're working on so I'll give a link in the description of this exact one but there's many in the market that will do the job but you really need one does before jumping in so maybe you just bought a new home and you're doing a project for the first time or you just need a refresher so let's get you acquainted and get your bearings to a standard outlet the first sign is going to be your hot side and that's going to be denoted by these brass screw terminals you'll also see black is the predominant wire color for hot but if it's a switched outlet or receptacle you might also see red coming into the side one other thing to know if this is a switched outlet so if one side is always hot and the other is actually controlled by a light switch you'll see this commonly in homes with lighting that is not overhead so you have to turn on and off a lamp you do need to remove this connector here so then you could wire in black to one side always hot and red coming from your slip your sorry your switch to the other side and then those will independently operate this connector here connects them both together and that's okay for a common circuit so you can just connect hot one side and it will it will operate both the top and bottom plug but again if you have a switched outlet you're going to need to remove that tab then that tab it's easy enough to remove you just need some needlenose pliers and you can wiggle it back and forth and remove you only need to remove that from the hot side the other side you have silver and green so silver is going to go to your white or neutral wire and then your bear or common wire will go to your green then the only other thing you're going to see the small slot will correspond to the hot side and the brass terminals and the larger slot will be on your neutral side so a common question or what you'll see when you jump into some of these boxes in your house is its inconsistent how much people strip in terms of insulation from the wire before they connect to the screw terminals and just know that most outlets these days do come with these pushpins where you could strip the insulation off and then press the copper in to the outlet and there's a small retainer here that would hold it and then you do need to press that to release it that is not recommended and in some places that's actually against code and that's because that's just going to be a weaker point of the outlet and could be a failure mode in the future so it's always recommended to go to the screw terminals once it's shown to you which many people don't know is there actually is a strip gauge built into pretty much any outlet that you'll see so what you need to do is just line up your wire insulation kind of mark that with your fingernail or a marker and that's how much you need to strip off another common tool is wire strippers so this is where you match up to in this case it's 14 gauge wire and then that's how I'm getting the correct amount of wire to strip so two different ways on how to get a nice loop here that's appropriate size for the screw terminal if you do have the wire strippers you can pass the copper just through this hole here and then wrap that around the outside and that's going to give you a nice loop and you can just tighten that up a little bit and then you're ready to go or another way if you don't have the wire strippers you can take let's say these are needlenose pliers you can grip the copper wire and just wrap it around the pliers to get your loop all right now with our wire and the loop we'll go ahead and place that around the screen terminal and then I'm going to set it against there's this little retainer here that really holds that insulation well so I'm going to set that against the retainer and then we'll go ahead and secure down the terminal okay and really that's there's not much to it right but this is exactly what you're looking for the wire is secured against this retainer here and you can see you have copper all the way around connected to that brass terminal with no insulation between the terminal itself and this bottom brass piece just want to show you an example of stripping not enough wire so it was too short in terms of the copper wire exposed compared to insulation and you can see the insulation will then interact with the screw terminal and not get you the connection you're looking for between the wire and the terminal on the other hand if you strip too much wire this is what you're looking at and this is just not best practice to have exposed wire past the outlet and can cause issues down the road all right so here's an example of a basic circuit we have our hot wire connected to the brass screw terminals if it's a basic circuit it does not matter if it's top or bottom and then we have our Neutral connected up to the silver and then ground and really that's all you're looking for there's there's no wire that's pushed up we have nice connection all the way around we have no insulation interfering with the screw terminal the wires are set against the retainer and they're stripped all to the appropriate length so that is what you're looking for and easy enough so just one other example if you have a little bit older home maybe built in the 60s or 70s or some of the nicer homes the higher end homes you'll have switched outlets and that is where you're getting power from a light switch and that is powering the top or bottom depending on the setup but powering one side and then the others are always on so in this case you'd have two different hots coming in one being black which should be your always-on outlet side and then one being switched which will be controlled and this is usually for lamps or something like that the one note is if you're swapping out an outlet and changing it out one mistake that can be made or overlooked is you need to remove that that little tab here which was connecting these two terminals if that's not removed obviously you cannot control these independently so when you remove that now I can provide power independently to both sides so that is it hopefully this helped you guys out give you just an idea to make you more confident going into those simple electrical projects like changing out an outlet if this video helped you out go ahead and subscribe to our Channel we'll keep these type of videos coming out on a weekly basis and hopefully help you guys out with your projects around the house

Channel: Everyday Home Repairs

Views: 2,558,114

Keywords: electrical outlet wiring, electrical outlet basics, first time installing outlet, diy electrical projects

Id: UwGoU3XVpnI

Length: 8min 44sec (524 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 19 2020