Electrical Wire Color Coding Used By Electricians

what's going on my friends this is dustin stelzer with electrician you and today we're going to talk about wire [Laughter] colors [Music] okay what do all of the wire colors mean why do we have red and purple yellow and green and white and gray all these different colors of wires well if you look we have the same color of tape so we can mark different wires different colors to identify them as these colors but these colors are very specific so what is it why did why are there different colors [Music] first off if all of the conductors were black how would you know which ones which there are certain conductors that have different potentials between each other so we need to be able to identify a conductor that has power on it versus a conductor that doesn't have power on it but there are very specific points within a circuit that we also need to identify and it basically just means this wire is a certain thing this wire has voltage on it relative to another wire or relative to ground but it's telling us a little bit of information for the most part most of the colors are what we call ungrounded conductors or hot conductors all the hots um have a bun a whole plethora of different colors and it depends if you're in a single phase environment if you're in three-phase environment as to what those colors will be but pretty standard across the board we're gonna start out with the green wire the green is what's known as ground overseas you know europe things like that they call it earth but it's the same thing it's what's tied to earth to the ground the reason we call it a ground is because we physically bring a wire from a grounded conductor or a neutral down to the ground and tie that into ground we basically bring the center point of an electrical system down to the ground and touch the ground with it so that the center point of the entire electrical system all the way through the electrical system and every pole along the way everywhere is referencing the same point the same potential essentially so there's not big large fluctuations between different parts of the electrical system so we have a common reference point for ground and ground is always green and ground is also earth so that's not going to change anytime you see a ground conductor or if you see a yellow conductor with ground green stripes on it that's another way that they identify ground next we're going to talk about white white is what we call neutral it's also what in the code book is called the grounded conductor now there's a difference between a grounding conductor and a grounded conductor gets confusing when you're first trying to start to understand code just remember that a hot is ungrounded it's not touching ground at all it is a hot wire we don't want it touching the ground so ungrounded is hot and grounded is neutral hot neutral ungrounded grounded they both end in ed the weird one is the one that doesn't have any power on it and that's the green that's the one that's the ground wire so that's how i always remembered hot neutral are ungrounded and grounded and then ground is the grounding conductor so anyways we're talking about the white conductor or the neutral when you're out in the field nobody's gonna call it the grounded conductor we're not lawyers we don't wear suits every day we're not making up code we are electricians and we call it a neutral so the neutral conductor is white and that's going to be across the entire system whether you're in single phase or in a three-phase environment that's the wire that is the center point between uh two different phases three different phases or if you're in a single phase environment basically you have two hots or you have three hots two ungrounded or three ungrounded conductors but the center point of all of those where the transformer is tapped to be able to cut all of your voltages from 240 volts down to 120 volts you have to have the center point that you can tap off of so to identify that center point in the system we call it a neutral and we tape it white so that we know that every other conductor in that system is going to have a certain voltage to this one reference point so the grounded conductor and grounding conductor or the neutral and the ground should be at the same potential when you have a meter and you're you're on your voltage setting and you go between a white and a green there should not be any voltage between them it should your meter should read zero volts if it doesn't and it reads like 40 volts there's a problem but we need to know what the green and the white mean because the green and the white shouldn't have voltage on them and then when you look at a white compared to a red a white compared to a blue a white compared to a black we know that those colors mean there should be a certain voltage between those conductors so i know that between a black and that white there should be probably 120 volts 110 115 somewhere in that ballpark that's what i would expect a red and a white same thing a blue and a white same thing because in a three-phase system you're you're gonna have voltages that are between one hot and neutral you're gonna have voltages that are between one hot and ground and you're gonna have voltages that are between one hot and another hot so the the other reason why we would have blue or black or red is that each one of these hots needs to be identified as to which phase it is which incoming leg of the system it is so we know if we've got the black conductor that all the way up to the pole and going back to the utility that black conductor is our a phase and then we've got a red conductor we know that that one goes back and that's the i guess the middle phase or the not really the middle phase there's three phases they're all equidistant but you get what i'm saying the black the red and the blue represent which incoming wire has potential in relative to another hot wire so the black the red and the blue are usually three phase colors in single phase like you have in a house you're just gonna have black and red so that's how you know when you open up a panel whether or not you have single phase or three phase single phase is just gonna be a black and a red and then you're obviously gonna have your neutral and your ground your white and green you're gonna have those everywhere but then if you go to three phase you're gonna have black red and blue as your three hots and you're gonna have your white and your green for your neutral and your ground the next color we're gonna talk about is orange so orange is something that you're probably rarely going to come across but you will come across sometimes in residential sometimes in commercial but it's older three-phase systems in a three-phase environment typically you're gonna have three hots and those three hots all have the same voltage between all of them and usually they're gonna all have volt the same voltage to ground or neutral from hot to ground or neutral the orange tells you that's not the case it's almost like a warning or danger um for that color choice because it means one of those hots actually has 208 volts to ground so if you were to take your multimeter and go like a phase to b phase you're going to hit 240 volts if you go b phase to c phase 240 volts c phase 2 a phase you're going to get 240 volts nothing weird there the orange doesn't affect that it's only once you start testing to ground from each one of these hots so from phase a to ground you're gonna have 120 volts just like you should like you would think c phase to ground you're gonna have 120 volts but that b phase that's marked orange is going to have 208 to ground that's really important to know because if you were to start putting a whole bunch of wires into a panel and just landing them all like you normally would just one breaker at a time fill in every single spot top to bottom everywhere that you have b phase in that panel you're going to have 208 to ground so say that one of those wires that you've got hooked up to one breaker that is pushing 208 through it you hook a vacuum cleaner that's rated at 120 volts and you run 208 through it you're going to fry that vacuum cleaner tvs anything like that that's not rated for 208 volts you're going to fry so this happens often i mean it's it's just one of those things that people don't really know what that orange means until you learn the hard way or until somebody you know teaches you um so watch out for the orange thing orange kind of just means danger uh something's different here need to know something's crazy here now i will say that there are some higher voltage systems some like 480 and up systems that utilize orange in their color depending on where you're at in the country you could come across a three-phase system that's 480 volts and the colors are brown yellow purple or brown orange yellow now that orange and a higher volt system that's a 480 volt system doesn't mean the same thing when it's in a 480 volt system it's just one of the three hot colors so there's no difference in voltage between any of those things that's why some cities don't use that color nomenclature some cities prefer doing brown yellow purple i think most do but there's just some weirdo cities out there that like to do brown orange yellow brown yellow and purple usually mean that you are working with a voltage system that's higher than a typical three-phase voltage system so it's not necessarily medium voltage or high voltage a lot of electricians call the black red blue they call that low voltage and then they call high voltage brown yellow and purple it just means that instead of you having 240 volts from hot to hot like you would on the black red blue on the brown yellow and purple you're going to have 480 volts between each one of your hots and you're also going to have 277 volts between each one of the hots and neutral or each one of the hots and ground so it's a little bit higher voltage system most of your equipment is going to be 600 volt rated for this environment whereas before you were at 250 volt rated so it's just a different class of equipment different class of gear higher voltage going through everything so you need to know that because it's a little bit more dangerous it's a lot more dangerous to be working on this stuff so that was oh and another one we have the gray conductor so anytime you see a gray conductor or something taped gray usually that's to let you know that in a 480 volt system that's the neutral conductor or the grounded conductor so gray for 480 volt system is the same as white for a 240 volt system white and gray just mean neutral but it's just for two different systems now there are some places that you're going to see different colors than this or you're going to see some of these same colors mixed into things and they don't mean the same thing for instance if you have ballasts if you're like working in a fluorescent fixture or an led fixture you're going to open up and see one side of that ballast has a black and a white conductor the other side of the ballast usually has two reds two blues and two yellows or a red blue yellow depending on what kind of ballast it is but red blue and yellow are ballast leads and it's just basically telling you what are my two supply or line side conductors and which is my load coming back into the ballast and there's wiring diagrams that actually show you what color is what part of the circuit so in that situation these colors don't mean the same things it's just a way for them to identify the outgoing and incoming another thing that you're probably going to find in lighting control systems that are colored conductors are dimming wires so there's some ballasts out there that you can remotely dim a load from a different location and there's two extra conductors that go up into light fixtures and they will have inside the fixture somewhere for these wires to land and a lot of times these are purple and gray conductors so a lot of higher end light fixtures will come with a set of dimming leads already in the fixture or you'll come across these t5s are a good example a lot of t5 ballasts t8 ballasts that have these little inputs so that you can put dimming wires in or if you're ever up in like a whole row of fixtures in a shopping center or something like that and you see these purple and gray conductors that are usually a little bit smaller you usually like the size of ballast leads you just know that this is remote dimming so somewhere there's a lighting control system that is um sending a dimming signal rather than a regular dimmer would just you know start to change um the nature of the circuit so that it starts to dim uh these actually have constant power to the fixtures but they send a remote signal to start to dim the power so it just works a little bit differently so that's pretty much it for the colors they're really just telling you this wire has this potential in comparison to this wire or this is this place in the system and these are the other things in the system it's actually telling you information so that you don't miswire something and accidentally blow something up or get somebody hurt you need to be you know even if you're wiring like speakers there's always a black and a red conductor so that you know what your positive and your negative is because you need to know in relation to one or the other um and you know in that situation a speaker might not actually work if you flip those wires in a house or a commercial building or an industrial environment you mix up your wires you could blow something up create a fire kill somebody so it's really really important to be able to identify conductors and know which conductors that you're working with so just to review the green is the ground the white and the gray are the neutral black red and blue mean three phase black and red means single phase but they're usually 240 volts or less orange means that you've got one conductor that's 240 volts to ground where all the other hot conductors are going to be 120 to ground so it's kind of like orange is like a hazard color it's a warning and then you've got your high voltage stuff already said the neutral is gray but you have either brown orange yellow boy that's how i remember that in weird places but the majority of people are doing brown yellow purple and that's bip byp that's how i remember the the order of them and what phase order that they go in but that's it so thank you guys so much for sitting through that was probably really boring i love you crazy people make sure that you hit subscribe like the videos if you like this stuff really helps me out i would appreciate it um thanks for all the support if you're interested in merch go to my website links in the description below if you're looking for some practice tests and you actually want to try to take a practice test not just flip through a book and answer questions but but test yourself and take a practice test check out another link in the description below go to electricianu.com and you can actually take practice tests for your residential wiremen's license your journeyman's license and your master license love you crazy people and i'll see you in the next one [Music] you

Channel: Electrician U

Views: 286,958

Rating: 4.9004378 out of 5

Keywords: electrician, electrical, electricity, dustin stelzer, apprentice, journeyman, electrician vlog, construction, commercial, residential, electrical vlog, electrician show, trade school, electrical courses, electrician courses, electrical class, electrician class, electrician school, wire colors in electrical, wire, wiring, electric, electrical wiring color code, wire color code, electrical wiring, house wiring, neutral wire, neutral, phase, earthing, current, voltage, ground, earth wire, 3 phase

Id: LhZcWykPWQc

Length: 16min 14sec (974 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 16 2020