Electrical Wiring Basics Clarification

welcome to the channel I'm Brett and today I'm going to clarify some information that I put in my electrical Basics video [Music] so the electrical Basics video was a big hit and it helped a lot of people I got a lot of good feedback from the video but I also got some feedback from some people saying oh well you shouldn't hook up Outlets that way and things like that and so if you've watched the video or if you do watch the video I'm going to clarify a couple things in this video of how to hook up some outlets for years in construction I've seen electrical Journeymen like your top level journeyman electricians hookup Outlets the way that I hooked them up in the video and the reason I did that was I kind of wanted to show how the circuit kind of works and how it all kind of flows together and I actually don't hook it up that way so the problem with this setup is that all the current through your circuit is going through this one section this piece of metal and that's what a lot of people were concerned about I will just say that having worked with guys for years and seen this set up I have never once even heard of an of this piece of metal going bad and this not working properly so to pigtail the ground what I did is I got a six inch piece of that bare copper wire the ground wire and connect it to the screw and came out and then I ran these up these ground wires up to the end of this pigtail and connected them together and so to basically do the same principle with a neutral and a hot wire what you're going to do is take a about a six inch piece of wire connect it to the proper screw and then you're going to connect it up and you can either use a wire nut or one of the connectors that I'm going to use and it's the same principle with that silver screws for your neutral six inch piece of wire to run your neutral wires over to it and connect them up so you still completed the circuit because you have your two hot wires essentially coming into one hot wire that's on the same circuit and then it just connects up to the gold screw and it makes the outlet hot and then when you plug in your device it completes the circuit and then goes to the neutral screw back to the panel box and then of course your ground just kind of follows suit with a neutral follows it back to the panel box so I'm going to start by doing is prepping my outlet usually I'll just take these pieces of wire connect them up take a bunch of these around with me and then when I go terminating them in the box I'd sit there and just plug everything together and just move on so just like always carefully carefully carefully get the jacket off from the Romex be left with three wires trip one of the wires off about 3 8 of an inch and the other one about three quarters of an inch and go ahead and make a loop on the wires so on these screws they're all going to tighten clockwise and so what you want to do is you want to put your wire on such that when you tighten this screw down it's also going to tighten your wire up and make sure that you tighten up both screws a lot of times when I go into redo Outlets or something both the one screw will be tightened up against the wire the other screw will just be sticking out here a little ways go ahead and get the screw tightened up so it's not just sticking out and this isn't necessary but I do Wrap black electrical tape around the outlet and that just makes sure that nothing can come over and hit these hot screws here and short something out anytime you work on this obviously the power should be out should be off so hopefully you won't go sticking a screwdriver or something in here while it's hot when you use these connectors make sure that the copper goes clear to the end of that clear plastic so the argument with the way I hooked it up in the way that I've seen it hooked up tons of times by professional electricians is that as the current comes through the wire and comes in through one wire goes through the outlet and goes back out all the current that comes through this circuit has to go through this one outlet and so I can kind of see the argument where it's like you know you may not want to do that the way that this pigtail works is kind of just provides a stopping off point like if you're on the highway you get off on an on-ramp and then get back on but other cars are just continually going back and forth It's kind of the same principle here this is kind of a stopping off point so all the current doesn't have to go through that one Outlet so I do agree with that and actually I think that this is easier to hook up this pigtail way just because I'm going to come over here and connect all these together with those connectors even with wire nuts it'd be easier just to wire nut them together push them back in the Box rather than sit here and try to get these perfect get them to Loop over the screws but you know even if you have a newer house check it out see if your electrician did it the one way to where two wires go on you know either screw and then you know and then the wires go on the other screw and they still pigtailed the grounds together I'm willing to bet there's plenty of people out there plenty of professionals out there still doing that so you do want to make sure that these wires are pretty close to being the same length go ahead and strip these off these ones are only 3 8 because you're not trying about three of an inch because you're not trying to wrap them around the screw or anything and you certainly don't want any copper sticking out of the back of the connectors or a wire nut if you decide to wire nut these so now the next part is just as simple as plug in the wires into their respective connectors and they'll put any sharp bends in The Wire just enough to kind of get these looped around and as carefully as you can just kind of get these wires to lay in there neatly and usually what I'll do is I'll turn it to the side and get these pushed back and then when I put the screws in it'll just I won't have to use the screws to force the wires back it'll just kind of sit in there and one more thing I like the look of this here foreign this is your Ground Terminal here at the bottom this rounded terminal I don't believe there's a code for whether that has to be up or down so I hope I didn't throw any electrical journeyman who do residential wiring under the bus but I caught a lot of flack for setting up that circuit that way and so definitely go ahead and pigtail everything up this is also going to make this a lot easier pigtailing when you go to replace Outlets if they ever go bad where all you have to do is just disconnect one wire from from each screw and then hook up the wires to a new outlet and put it back in So if you saw my video where I installed the boxes in my garage you'll see that there was actually multiple Romex wires coming into some of the boxes and I pigtailed a lot of those together as well so then there was only one of each wire going out that I could hook up to a light and it made a lot more convenient so I hope this video will help to clarify some things we're grateful for everyone who has subscribed to our Channel and support our Channel we hope to see in the next videos [Music] thank you [Music] [Applause]

Channel: BrettleyBuilt

Views: 20,670

Keywords: diy, money saving, homeowner, handyman, carolina carport, alans factory outlet, metal building, metal garage, electrical basics, wiring basics, pigtail outlets, wiring metal garage

Id: jSpE2xjsO-I

Length: 7min 51sec (471 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 29 2022