Electrical Wiring Basics

so it's a super cold night here in western pennsylvania i i've kind of taken a break from the framing for a couple days because my friends needed to use my garage to work on their jeep so i didn't get any lumber but i'm gonna be doing the electrical work here pretty soon after i get these beams built in the next video and so i thought i'd take this opportunity just to kind of explain how the wiring is going to go the wiring process uh how three-way switches work how to wire up outlets which wire to use which breakers to use and just kind of give an overview of what i'm going to be doing which will also help those of you who want to do wiring at home it's basically exactly the same principle they would use to wire light in a bedroom or you know down in basement projects or you know wherever you need to do wiring so hopefully this helps you out and as with all my videos this is kind of a you know do this at your own risk this kind of work is dangerous um i've mentioned it with the nail guns and with the table saw things like that um one accident could certainly change your life but it's nothing that is to be afraid of as long as you just kind of respect the tools and certainly respect electricity i know that this stuff really isn't that difficult to learn a lot of people are just nervous because you know electricity is electricity and they always hear about people getting shocked and whatnot but um of course do this at your own risk but this is really simple things that pretty much anybody can figure out [Music] i'm sure you're familiar with electricity in that if you have a circuit it has to be complete and current is nothing more than a flow of electrons around the circuit and all these electrons do go around the circuit but in order for them to flow you have to have a closed loop and that's one of the basic principles of electricity and what i use when i wire is this romax a lot of electricians they'll use the individual strands but i like the romex because it comes with three wires inside so i don't know if you can see that but inside here there's three wires in this jacket and what's nice about it is it's basically one wire that can complete your loop and what i mean by that is let's take our panel box or in my case out here it's going to be a sub panel and i'm going to take power from the box to something like say a switch then maybe i'll come over to a light and then i'll continue back and in order for this circuit to be complete the power has to leave the panel box and get back to the panel box so with this romex it's really nice because let's take just let's get rid of this copper wire and grab it it's freezing cold so i have my gloves on so now let's look at this from the perspective of the romex so we have our panel box oops a little dyslexic today the power leaves the power when i say power it's you know that might say a line's hot or where the electricity is coming from so the power is coming from the panel box through the black wire and say this is where our switch will be see we'll have another black wire that'll come over and hit our light and then this is what completes our circuit is now it'll travel down this white wire and go back to one of the bus bars in the panel box so the copper wire is your ground wire and it acts similar to the neutral wire it provides another avenue for the electricity to get back to the panel box and complete the circuit in outlets it's a safety thing instead of you becoming the short circuit and going from the hot to yourself and and hurting yourself it'll actually provide another avenue to get the electricity back and since this copper wire is more conductive than you are it'll make it back to the panel box and down to the ground safely okay so i drew out some circuits here that are going to represent the circuits that i'm going to use the smaller circuits i'm going to use in this building there's a few more and a few people have reached out to me asking me some questions on youtube and i'll create another video that gets a little bit more involved but the one thing that i want to preface is i i'm not one of these guys that take shortcuts with a wire there's different ways to wire these circuits to save some wire and for me i just like it to work 110 of the time and so i absolutely won't you know use the if you look at some of these circuits online people actually take the neutral wire and they'll make it a hot to get it to run back or run a switch or something like that i don't do stuff like that i'd rather spend that extra a couple dollars and just make sure it's gonna it's gonna work regardless but i've come in to rewire houses before and do different things and you have to sit here and play these little games and figure out where you know where the wires went in these circuits because they decided to use the neutral as a hot wire to go back to lights and different things like that so just for ease of the next person um i certainly don't like to make things more complicated than they have to be so we'll start out with a little panel box that i made here and these breakers put out a couple breakers here and they're all a little bit different and you can tell they're they're always marked what the amperage is the voltage in these circuits is always 120 volts but the amperage is different and that's what you want to pay attention to the white romex is 14 gauge 15 amp wire and the yellow romex is a 12 gauge 20 amp wire and so whenever you're running these circuits you want to make sure that you that you pair up the proper breaker size with a proper wire you can always say put the you know a larger wire on a smaller breaker and that's not a big deal but you never want to go the other way and say put that 14 gauge 15 amp wire on 20 amp breaker then you could potentially cause a fire one thing that you do want to pay attention to with the breakers a lot of them are well they're all kind of specific to certain boxes and so you want to make sure that you use the correct breaker or the compatible breaker for the type box you have so if you have a general electric box you may not be able to use a murray breaker in there and you can see some of the connections that they'll make inside the box are a little bit different they won't always hook up the same way and so you definitely when you go to you know if you want to run an extra circuit for whatever you're doing a garage or basement or whatever you want to make sure that you select a select a compatible breaker to hook up the the circuit in your panel box okay so here's my little panel box drawn out i'm gonna use a 20 amp breaker and you'll see that just like in my last video i have my little bus bars here on the side so for for my sub panel i had to separate the neutrals and the hots so i have the white wire the neutral going to one bus and the ground going to the other bus and my breaker in the middle 20 amp breaker with my 12 2 wire and 20 amp or 12 gauge wire and my 20 amp wire so you'll notice i wrote 12 2 here and you'll notice i have 14 2 down by this white wire and it's a little difficult to understand at first you'll notice that there's three wires in this yellow romex so why would we call it a 12-2 well i don't know that people that manufacture this or whatever they you know electricians or whoever came up with this i guess they're only considering the two wires that are used to like the two main wires to transport the or to conduct the electricity and so you don't count the neutral wire or you don't count the ground wire and so this is a 12-2 wire because it's 12 gauge wire and there's two wires inside if we come over to this little wire you notice it's white so it's 14 gauge 15 amp wire but you notice that it has another red wire it has a red wire so there's a white red and a black wire so this is going to be called 14 3 wire three wires not counting the ground and that's very important when we get to this circuit which is going to be a three-way switch okay let's start with the typical outlet wearing a typical outlet in your home so this is a rated for 20 amp circuit so like i said before we have our panel box or sub panel hooked up so let's discuss what's actually going on to hook this up we hooked up the black to the breaker and then we hooked up our other two wires to the buses then our yellow wire comes along and i use blue instead of the white wire just because i obviously there's no way to draw white on white so i have the white wire that i hook up to the silver screws i have the copper wire which is hooked up to the ground screw and i have the hot which is connected to the copper screws so this is very standard um if somebody hooked this up backwards it's not a huge deal ac power is pretty forgiving there's a whole theory behind it so if you connect them backwards just connect them back the right way i don't really want to get into the theory on how all this stuff works in this video so whenever you turn the breaker on it's going to make the circuit hot which means there's this black wire is going to have power to it it's going to have power clear up to this screw and then to the terminals here and as soon as you plug something in here you're going to complete the circuit so if you plug in a lamp and turn the lamp on your power is going to flow through the black wire and it's going to go through the lamp come back to the neutral and then head back out all the way back to your panel okay that was for a single outlet for two outlets it's not a big deal same same process come over to your first outlet you're gonna hook up your neutral to the silver screw and you're going to hook up the black wire to a copper screw and then with your other screws kind of follow me on this your other neutral is going to come up and hook up to the silver screw your other black wire is going to hook up to the top i would recommend trying to stay consistent make sure that if you hook this black wire up to the top hook up that other neutral to the top of the silver screw and then this wire would go to the bottom this other screw would go to the bottom just try to stay consistent when you do electricity and try to keep things neat so it's easy to follow here you're going to have to actually wire not these copper wires together because as you'll see when i go to actually wire the building you'll notice that there'll be a wire off from this copper wire coming off this be wire nut and then this new this ground will come in then this ground from this other wire will come in it's not good practice to put two wires on one screw and so what you do is you kind of make a pigtail here and connect them all together and then heading down the circuit back to that the last circuit same principle as before just hook it hook it up and just terminate the circuit at the end okay now we're gonna hook up a light and you guessed it we're gonna use a 15 amp circuit with our 14 gauge wire same principle as before we're going to hook up a ground to a bus neutral to a bus and we're going to hook up the black to the breaker and we're going to come over to the switch let's start with the ground this time remember we had a great on the last circuit we had a ground wire and a ground wire from two different wires what we're going to do is the same thing we're going to create a little pigtail and bring the two grounds over and we're going to wire nut them together so we've stayed safe making sure that there's not two wires on one screw then we're going to hook up our neutral wires and the reason is because the neutral wires aren't aren't going to break the circuit it's the hot black wires that are going to break the circuit so as we were talking before you have a circuit and as long as the electrons can flow around as long as the power can flow around in a circle you're good what the switch does is break it at a certain point so the circuit's broken and your light turns off and so what we'll do is we'll hook the one black wire up to the first screw and then we'll bring the other black wire over to the bottom screw it really doesn't matter which side you want to put these on because all you're doing is breaking the circuit nothing's really specific here and so what's happening is when you flip this breaker on we'll go and turn our breaker on just for good practice we turned our breaker on now all of a sudden the circuit's hot so now electrons are flowing or our powers flowing over to the first hot screw you'll see that our switch is off so this these contacts aren't being made but now if we turn our switch on now the electricity is flowing through contacts made through the switch and it goes over to the black wire comes over to your light fixture and then this light turns on and since this is on and completing a circuit the power is also electrons are also flowing back through to your panel box completing the circuit even though i have this little old timer light this works with pretty much any light that you have and a lot of lights i've seen they don't really have places to hook up the ground so don't completely panic if there isn't a place to look up the ground you just take that ground wire and push it way up in the box out of the way and if you have any questions obviously contact a real electrician i just play an electrician on youtube i know what i'm doing but i can't answer all the questions to every situation as soon as the circuit is made here you can put as many lights on here as you want if these are wired correctly which i'll show you how to do that when i'm actually wiring things up and then it'll come and then as you wire these things up the electricity will flow through multiple lights and then end up completing the circuit so really there's really nothing to be overwhelmed about electricity hooking these circuits up is actually pretty simple so i can tell you people are pretty smart just by looking at you and so we're gonna move on to a little bit more advanced circuit and this is a three-way circuit and what this allows you to do is control a light from two different switches and these are used for stairways or in large rooms or if you have two doorways the reason i'm using them is because i have two doors so what i want to be able to do is walk in this door turn on the lights grab a tool do whatever i'm going to do in here and then be lazy and not walk out that door i want to walk out the back door and so what i can do is as i leave i flip the switch off over there and it still turns off all my lights so same principle here we have our panel box and we have our neutral and our ground hooked up to our bus bars and we have our breaker and so same thing the 14 gauge wire the 14 2 wire is hooked up and it's pretty simple at first comes over and it's connected just like we connected our other switch we came up here we hit a screw and we hooked up our ground and then we hooked up our neutral this is where this gets a little bit trickier with the three-way switch your power comes in on the black screw and the way these switches work is as you flip the switch up or down right down right now you have it flipped down so say like this screw would connect to this terminal let's say we flip it up this screw now conducts to this terminal and why that's important is let's say that the hot power is coming through the hot or the power is coming up to this screw then let's say that it conducts across from this screw to this screw and then it goes into this red wire and this red wire and this black wire are called traveler wires so let's say that it goes across to the screw now we follow the red across we come up here now look our switch is down so let's say that this black screw is connected to this screw well now there's no way to conduct a cross to make that to complete the circuit for the light and this is how three-way switches work right now you can have power up to this switch because somewhere power is coming through up to this switch and this is where it's going to break so say that i flip this switch up now let's follow the path of the power i'm gonna run really bad shadows here so now we have the black wire coming over to the black screw comes across to the red to this screw here connected to the red wire comes across hits the red wire now it comes over to this terminal here this screw here now it conducts across and look what it does it hits our light power hits our light goes back through the neutral wire and goes back around back to our panel blocks we've completed a circuit now let's flip this switch off let's see what it does now black wire comes across hits this screw here comes to this screw now we follow the black wire around except for this conducted this way without switch being up now we have no conduction through this screw to this screw which means the power won't make it to the light and that's how three-way circuits work is these two switches kind of work together to break the circuit through these traveler wires and that's why you need a 14-3 wire because you need this extra wire for traveler wires so when you wire this circuit you're going to wire up the switch just like normal just go up to your black screw wherever the power is coming in at and then you're going to take the black wire and the red wire and hook them up to whatever terminal whatever screw you want doesn't even matter but when you come over to the other side be consistent if you hook the red screw up or if you hook the red wire up to the screw on the right do the same thing here and hook the the red wire up to the screw on the right and same thing with the black you just want to be consistent so these circuits are pretty basic throughout your house um there's different outlets and stuff you can use with the gfcis and i'll wire those in later and explain a little bit more about what they are but i just want to do a video on some of the basic wiring i have a bunch of friends and stuff that you know i always do their wiring or i'm trying to teach them how to do wiring and they're interested in learning but uh they just need some some way to get started so i hope this helped you out i really enjoy uh teaching people how to do things um i've got comments that they're like oh you know you do a good job explaining stuff i try i do have a master's degree in education but i don't teach because i think the education system is a little wrecked right now hopefully they'll fix it but i do enjoy teaching people so if there's anything that you'd like to learn i mean i don't know everything but i certainly if you have any questions about these circuits um please put them in the comments and i'll try to answer them so i'm gonna be buying lumber here in a couple days uh now that my friends finished up with their jeep tried to get things a little bit more organized in here and get all my toys in my toy box i don't know this place is really hard to work in right now and i'll work on finishing up a couple small walls that you've basically already seen how they get framed up so i'm gonna hurry and throw up a couple walls and then i'm gonna put those beams on the top and they're not going to be very high they're only going to be i think i'm going to do two by eights just because the span is going to be very long and i'm going to also build them out of some plywood and i'll show you how i'm going to put those together and then after that i'm going to span i think it's going to be two by eights across because i can't seem to find the number one yellow pine i don't know if anybody out there knows where you can buy that stuff number one yellow pines like the best stuff you can spend quite a ways with it somehow nobody in my area has it so that's what i'd like to use but i think i just have to go with a a bigger number two pine board which i'm not thrilled about but whatever so look forward to those videos if you enjoyed this video like share and subscribe and stay posted for when i actually wire this up should be in a couple weeks hopefully i'll get the beam video out and all these beams done next week like i've been yammering on about for the past i don't know a few weeks about getting that done and after that we'll hit up the electrical and get some real lights in here so thanks for watching [Music] [Applause] [Music] you

Channel: BrettleyBuilt

Views: 1,551,204

Keywords: diy, money saving, homeowner, handyman, 20 amp circuit, 15 amp circuit, wiring, electrical, outlets, lights, Carolina Carport metal building, Romex, breakers, basic, basic wiring

Id: syaGf_XUMxA

Length: 23min 39sec (1419 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 10 2022