Episode 3 - How To Wire For and Install A Switch

[Music] what's going on everyone this is Dustin with electrician you this is a new channel that I'm doing it's more of the kind of how to use and we're talk about theory and how switches work and how three switch three-way switches work you know ladder logic and motor controls and all kinds of stuff so the very beginning of this is gonna be very basic and there's a lot of apprentices out there that are asking questions about kind of how basic stuff works how switches work and how a switch loop works and things like that so the first you know series of videos is going to be pretty straightforward pretty basic stuff and then it's just gonna get more and more advanced so today's video is just going to be about basic switches how to install a switch how to wire for a switch this is the way that I do it I'm gonna rip everything out a certain way and you know just show you kind of how I do it this is by no means the best way or the only way I mean there's always 10 different ways to do most of the stuff that we do so a lot of guys have certain you know ways that they twist their wire nuts and all of that so if you have a better way or if you see something that I'm doing that you maybe do a different way and you want to let me know go to electrician you on Facebook or just leave it in the comments below I'm happy to hear anybody's suggestions or ways that they do things differently so let's begin first thing I did is I just boxed up a couple of boxes I put a pancake up here for a light and so I'm gonna wire all of this stuff together and then I'm gonna put devices in an actually show and talk about how it all works this box right here is just going to be my incoming power I'm going to pretend that's like another switch or something but we're getting power from here we're gonna run power to this new switch that we're going to put in and then we're gonna have a pancake here I just didn't have an a LAN box or any other kind of box so I'm gonna put my light on this so this is how I do it first thing that I'm gonna do is I like to try to drill things out as straight as possible one trick that I do when I'm in the field when I'm on like a brand new house or something like that we're wiring in wood is I'll take a short cut of pipe and I'll measure out what my Swit my switch height is what my plug height is and what my countertop plug height is you have the same heights most of the time throughout the read the whole building so I'll take a piece of pipe and I'll mark with a sharpie on each one and these are at 45 inches to the top I'm trying to go within the ATA standards of everything so if you look in the back of the codebook in annex J they actually talked about with the Americans with Disabilities Act has those requirements for you know the heights that you put switches and plugs very important because somebody's sitting in a wheelchair you know they go to turn a light switch on and if you put it up at like sixty inches they can't buck and reach the light or if you put a plug too low they can't reach it either so go to the code book and look at the ATA standards but for right now this is just my garage I just put all my plugs at 45 and my switches at 45 inches to the top when I mark out a switch you see I did this looks like a backwards seven so when I mark out I usually mark a line at the top and that's to show the top of the box and I push a line down and that shows you which side of that line the box actually goes sometimes for plugs or you know in specific places I'll put it upside down I'll do a line here and then I'll just mark it up and that shows that's the bottom of the box but the box goes where this little squiggly line is so first things first I'm going to drill out all my holes I'm not actually gonna do a line a lot of times with like fresh apprentices I'll go through and when I mark the whole thing when they're going to be drilling everything I'll take another piece of pipe or a piece of Yunus thread or something like that and I'll mark the height that I want them to drill all of these studs out that way when you go through the whole building you see every single wire that's run through every wall is the exact same level and looks beautiful so when an inspector comes on a job they look and they're like holy everything is like beautifully perfect you know but today again I'm in my garage I'm not gonna do that I'm just going to drill a out [Music] all right so what I'm gonna do is I'm pretending right now that I have power at that box so I'm gonna run power from there to this switch box I'm using 12 - which 12 - is basically just three conductors it's got a black hot a white neutral and a bear ground inside of that they call it 12 - because there's actually two current-carrying conductors they don't count the the ground so I'm gonna run some 12 - from that box to that box and a little tip with you awful when you're running wire out it's a pretty common practice not to just grab wire from the middle of the roll and pull it and start working with it [Music] it's common practice to go from the outside of the room and roll outwards you don't want to just grab from the middle of the roll and pull because then the wire is gonna have this spiral and your wires gonna look like when you run it through something so you always want to pre roll out a number of wire and get it all straight and then run it through the walls it just looks a lot neater and keeps everything cleaner alright so when I'm rolling wire out I try to I try to figure out how much I'm gonna need you know each time you do this it's like two feet so it's like one two three four five six seven eight nine ten I'm just gonna roll ten feet of wire out so this is what it looks like you take the wire you step on it and you just roll it out as straight as you can get it that way when you go to work with the wire your wire is already nice and straight so you can run it through the studs without having all these little curlicues all right I'm gonna run all of the wires into the tops of the boxes that's just a habit that I like to get into especially when you're doing things above counter tops it's far more often that somebody's gonna have you raise a plug then they are gonna have you lower a plug so what happens is if you run this wire into this box and you get everything stapled and cut and later on the sheet rocks up and you need to raise this plug you're screwed you're gonna have to rerun the wire and cut all that sheetrock out to rerun the wire it's very it's not very often that you have to lower a switch or lower a plug most of the time they want them raised for some reason so I'm gonna rate I'm going to bring everything in to the top of the box now when you run your wire always try to make everything look very neat there's actually a bit in code and you do work in a neat and workman like manner that's actually code to do good work which is a pretty wise thing that they did that way people aren't just hack job and so I think that looks pretty everything down here is straight my damn microphone wire keeps getting in my way I'm going to do another loop right here cut the wire you always want to leave yourself about eight inches of wire outside of the box that's enough wire to work with and put a switch on [Music] April's on make sure that you don't over staple them or real steel crush into that wire and shorts happen that way so you want the wire to stay in place and not move but you don't want to penetrate through the insulation and cut the insulation you can actually fail inspections for that too and rightly so okay so we have power coming from our power source coming to our switch so we're feeding the switch power right now next thing we need to do is we need to bring that power from our switch up to our light so I've got a pancake up here pancake has a bushing in it that protects the wire from getting cut since you're in metal you need to make sure you put a bushing in there because we're using ro mix there's also a ground screw inside of this box so anything metal you always have to ground he always have to bond that metal on the wire to the metal that way you know nobody gets shocked when they touch the metal if a wire comes loose or something like that [Music] and I'm going to cut the wire same length and always trying to make sure that my wires are neat and together anytime you put staples on wire you want to make sure that you both flat sides with the flat side of the staple you don't ever want to stack two wires side-by-side and staple them like that we've actually failed inspections for that it's flat wire these people flat [Music] all right so now that we have all of our wire run out now is what we call rip out where we would rip all of the sheathing off the wires get everything twisted together and ready and prepped for putting a switch in so I'm gonna rip this switch out first this is my method of ripping out always make sure you get a sharp knife when you cut across these you need to leave at least a quarter inch of sheathing on the inside of that box so I cut across on the front in the back that allows you just to pull the sheathing off nice and neatly do it to the other wire pull it off there's a bleeding paper on the inside just cut that off and what you're left with is hot neutral ground hot neutral ground so this is our incoming power and this is our we call a switch leg that goes up to the light so first thing I do is I get my hot in neutral out of the way and I get my grounds twisted together I usually just make an X in the back of the box and twist this a couple of times you know you can see like there's three twists in there and then I take my clients and I pinch and I twist them even harder so that you have a really really nice bond there's no way that those are going to come untwist it then you cut one of them off and that just leaves you one tail on this ground is going to go on the switch itself I take a green wire nut specifically because they have a little hole in them take that make sure that it's twisted on there very very well and then I take this and fold it in the back of the box just to get it out of the way the next thing you do is you need to get your neutrals out of the way so usually I'll measure my bends like this I know that that's how I want that wire to fold into the back of the box so I measure it and I've got a little bit of slack down here it's too long so I'm going to cut it right about here I'll pull everything back out cut it off [Music] and then I'll strip my neutrals out when you strip a wire you don't ever want to strip it at 90 degrees to the wire you actually want to kind of go at about a 45 degree angle when you clamp down so when you slice you can peel forward and it already starts pulling the wire off this doesn't seem to a lot of people like a really important thing but sometimes when you pinch like this it doesn't come off so you're sitting there fighting it trying to get the the wire to come off so when you go at an angle and you pop it out it just naturally starts sliding that wire off another little trick after you've been doing this long enough you'll see the importance of why we do that then you're going to take these two wires and start twisting them I always hold my wires up here I don't ever hold them back here because if you hold it back to you far then everything starts to twist so you really want to control this joint so I always hold it up here and I start twisting and you want to have a really pretty twist to your wires you don't want it to be all ugly and nasty let's see how tightly all of those there's no way that these wires are gonna come apart I mean they are they're solidly together so I usually twist the joint and then I take a couple more twists and I twist you know probably the the next inch and a half of the wire [Music] another thing to get into a good habit of doing is cut your cut your joints at an angle so that they're not flat at the top cut them out a little bit of an angle because this inside of here inside that wire not actually on is conical so it goes in at the tip so if you have a sharp point here you're going to get that joint farther up inside of that wire nut and it's just going to grab on even better so I always push back and then I try to accordion up and push all of that back as far back in the boxes you can get it to get out of the way of the switch and then you have the last two wires one of them is the hot and one of them is going to be your switch leg I do the same thing I push that down accordion it back and then I cut off the link so for this switch I'm going to be using a Decorah style switch what's neat about these is that there's little plates here so you normally with a plug or something that doesn't have a plate behind it you would have to bend a hook with the wire and strip it out and then secure it down to that hook with these we can just strip out enough to get behind that plate and stick it right into the plate and then just tie it to tighten this down that's actually listed for that kind of use so that's what I'm going to do I'm going to strip out not very much probably about a half inch I don't want too much wire to be exposed outside of that plate or else you just chance the ground hitting it when you're folding it into the back of the box one thing I didn't do that I should have done is do the same thing with the ground accordion it back cut off the slack so now I've got these two wires that are going to the switch ripped out this ground wire I'm gonna have to bend a hook on so a lot of people bending hooks is very difficult for them at first they like let go of the wire and they start bending a hook and then you get this huge like crazy bend in your wire that is not what you want so I'm gonna straighten that back out what you want is a very very tight Bend so I always put my finger up here to brace it and just hang on and you want to use the tool to bend a very very tight bend in that so then the next thing you do is you take that hook you put in the wire in the ground wire and you want to get it around the ground screw sometimes you got to loosen them up a little bit to get the wire on there but see how it fits on there perfectly it's bent going clockwise so that way when you tighten up your screw as you tighten the wire grabs onto that screw even more what you do not want to do is you do not want to put your hook on in a counterclockwise direction because what that does is as you turn your screw it actually opens that that bend up and it loosens your wire so make sure every every time you put a hook on any kind of terminal that you always bend the hook you know up or a bend it in a clockwise direction so I'm going to tighten this guy down notice I'm doing the ground first it's a very good habit to get into always do your grounds first your neutrals second and your hots last putting your grounds on first ensures that the device is grounded you have some kind of safety safety harness essentially and then you start hooking up all of your hots so that way if you trip if you like are holding onto the piece of metal or something and you hit it it at least has a path to go back to ground and trip just a good habit to get in here now out of these two wires it does not matter which one goes on top or which one goes on bottom a switch just basically when you push it in one direction it touches these two contacts together and when you put it in the other direction it opens them up so they're no longer touching it so it does not matter if the hot is on the bottom or the leg is on the bottom but I am always a fan of trying to do things consistently in the same way over and over so I tend to put the hot on the bottom screw and the leg on the top that way if I'm troubleshooting and I come back into a box I usually know that the top one is the leg and I can take that off pretty confidently now there is a new code a new thing that's going on right now it not really new it's just a new thing that's being enforced very strongly and that's using torquing screwdrivers and and torquing all of your lugs torquing all of your devices and that'll tell you whether or not it's torque down for the code specs in the back of the code there's actually an annex that talks about every single thing that you tighten or loosen there's torque specs for all of them and so you have to follow that it's becoming more of an issue now people are not tightening stuff tight enough and then terminations are coming just barely loose and it's causing arcs in there and causing fires to happen so what you're seeing me do here right now I'm not using any torquing devices this is just for education for you know how to so disclaimer all right so now we got to put everything back in the box I try to grab everything in the very back and accordian it all just like we had done before take a lot of caution to make sure that that ground screw does not come over and flop and touch these because you'll go to turn the breaker on later and boom it'll trip the breaker and then you got to take every switch apart and figure out which one you have touching take the trusty drill out I don't ever tighten one screw down all the way till the very end I like to leave them out a little bit because sometimes you get a device that's cocked like that and you're trying to put it in and then it's all wonky so you have to you have to give yourself a little bit of room to sit and adjust it if you need you know if it's crooked you want all of your switches to be perfectly straight that way when you put the plate on the plates perfectly straight and everything's lined up all right so now our switches in next thing I want to do is rip out the light and I'm going to do the same thing take my knife I'm gonna barely score it you don't ever want to cut too deeply or else you'll make a short happen or you'll cut the insulation so get your bare wires out and looking at you first thing you want to do is take your ground and wrap the ground clockwise around the ground screw what that's going to do is bond this thing and make sure that since it's a metal surface if a short ever happens that you don't just have a piece of metal that has a hot wire touching it and then somebody comes up and tries to touch it and they get shocked by bonding it you're actually going to make the breaker trip you're going to give it a path to ground and then for a pancake you can't get a lot of wires in the pancake so I just tenderly generally try to accordion back and forth one time and then cut the excess off now on all of these you also want to strip them out the thing that we're gonna be putting them on is called a keyless fixture so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna take about an inch of this off and Bend a hook on my neutral and on my hot and the fixture that I'm using does not have a ground so the ground is gonna end up just staying back in there this is a keyless fixture some of these have pull chains for like really old attics a lot of them nowadays don't have a pull chain you just put a cage on this and you put a bulb inside so this is going to end up going up there just remember black is gold and white is silver again make sure that when you're tightening these don't over tighten them to the point where you break this little metal tab in there but tighten them down enough to where you know nothing's gonna come off now I'm gonna take these screws out because these screws are so short that they're not even gonna go through this thing because it's actually a pretty thick little piece of porcelain [Music] I'm gonna use the screws that were provided by the fixture and that's something I recommend doing in general anytime the light fixture comes with screws to use always try to use those screws because as a warranty issue if you use some other screws that you found in your truck or whatever they may not warranty the installation that you did so I always try to use the screws that come with the fixture because they are rated for it they've been ul listed they've been tested you next thing that I want to do is put a bulb on the fixture I just found this in my garage and I don't even know if it's good or not so it is an incandescent bulb meaning inside of this thing there's a little itty-bitty filament just a tiny little piece of wire that goes from this screw shell all the way up into the fixture and it wraps around and there's a whole bunch of little coils over and over and comes all the way back down through the middle to this piece of metal so this is one continuous piece of metal essentially so I should be able to open up my multimeter and I've got different settings I've got voltage amperage and continuity so I should be able to check with my meter if there's continuity and if there's continuity from the center of this all the way through to this I know that that filament is not broken it's actually good I'll send a tone all the way through so I'm gonna put one lead on the screw shell one lead on the bottom and this is actually a bad bulb you should hear a tone like that that's letting you know that that signal is getting sent all the way through but it's not so now I have to go find a different Bowl you all right so I'm going to screw a bulb in all right so the final step is to test everything I didn't have any switch plates or anything this is not something you want to do at home I basically plug the cord into a plug and I needed to bring power to this somehow so I just bent the wires over and plugged it into an extension cord again if you're not an electrician don't do this I'm the master electrician I know what I'm doing I know how did not shock myself or get hurt or anything so don't pay attention to that are there anyway so what we're doing is we're bringing power all the way through to our switch switches off and then we're gonna flip this switch to turn on power and it actually sends power up and then comes back all the way through and back to our source so that's pretty much it that's how you wire a switch pretty basic I know there's a lot of different other ways there's different kinds of switches there's different there's three-way switches four-way switches California three ways switch loops you know multitude of different ways to do switches but a switch is essentially just two points that are not touching and a flapper that when you change the position of the switch brings that flapper in and allows current to run through the switch and go to something so a lot of times people say a switch actually just breaks the power it like takes power and breaks it and then allows you to reconnect it simple so let me know if you guys have any questions again go to electrician you the Facebook page and watch if you like these videos go to the little notification Bell and click notifications and you'll get notified every time I do an episode and there's going to be a shitload I'm gonna do a lot more than these and if you guys have any suggestions for other videos things that you have seen people do or her seeing people talk about that you don't really understand you'd like clarify it or if you want to see how to bend pipe or anything like that I love doing the ship so get at me oh one other thing I have another channel called during a master and it's talking more about the electrical industry just the trade in general what it's like to be an apprentice what it's like to be a master electrician I've got some apprentices on there that I've interviewed that have talked about their times being an apprentice I've talked about trying to run my own company you have talked about all kinds of stuff we even get into philosophy and like having being a single dad and had you know like paying child support and trying to do this I'm trying to like earn away while you're not getting paid very well and then you know it's all over the place but it's actually a really good channel there's a lot of followers and it's a really engaged community so also check that out love you all guys have a good one and I'll see you on the next episode [Music]

Channel: Electrician U

Views: 512,479

Rating: 4.8986244 out of 5

Keywords: electrician, electrical, electricity, apprentice, journeyman, master, electrical vlog, electrician vlog, electrical videos, electrician videos, electrical show, electrician show, electrician u, dustin stelzer, journey 2 master, switches, wiring switches, how to wire a switch, how to install a switch, switch, how does a switch work, installing switches, install a switch, electrician training, electrical training

Id: 4oRFwlCS4jo

Length: 28min 21sec (1701 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 18 2018