Episode 49 - Electrical Rough In

hello viewers welcome back to the channel today we're talking running electrical lines and i've just finished running all of the romex more or less for the house and boy was it a task first off i doubled the amount of wire i thought i needed so uh whatever you think you might need you need more and you'll probably need double or you're just really good at estimating and i suck which is probably the case uh and with material prices increasing right now because it is april of 2021 uh yeah i paid double for the spool and other for the new romex versus what i bought originally so that was fun so you look at the main panel um it's a square d home line uh 40 space biggest one i could get and uh i'm just going to kind of take you through some of the circuits what i've done and kind of walk the house and kind of show you generally what i'm doing uh first step we talked about kind of ev chargers and electric vehicle chargers i've got three quarter inch emt conduit stub out so this will poke through the drywall and then i'll i'll tr i'll use a what's called an lb uh kind of pull box to transition to a 90 to go along the wall and then connect to those boxes that we showed earlier the rest of the runs are coming in from the top i tried to make it neat as neat as i could using these uh what's called cable stackers the red ones are garden bender the white ones are 3m this tells you how material shortages are working i get what i get i actually like the 3m ones better i think the garden benders can hold more conductors uh like you can double up uh 12 2s in them the 3ms you can't but but the 3ms work i think a lot better so uh this is these are all the circuits for the house uh for the home runs uh all the yellows are 12 to 12 gauge 20 amps and those are primarily uh receptacles i've got a few dedicateds i've got a dedicated uh what microwave circuit that's also running the uh starter for the range and the vent hood i've got a 20 amp um on the run to the side of the house to to run like a chicken coop or whatever kind of livestock stuff i've got uh i think that's about it for the 20 amps all the white are 14 gauge 15 amp that's lighting and then a uh a 15 amp for the dedicated 50 amp for the fridge kitchen fridge and a dedicated uh 15 amp for the furnace um a couple specialty circuits that i ran dedicated 20 amp for garage fridges and freezers so i had that i have a dedicated 20 amp for my network rack and for telecommunication equipment um let's see here i ran a 6-3 for the oven which will handle up to 50 amps uh the oven we got only pulls 40 but uh some can pull 50. so might as well run the heavier stuff and then i'll just put a breaker on this at 40 to limit the current and then i just i'll have the up size conductors if i ever want to do something bigger in the future standard 103 romex 30 amp for the electric dryer and then um i've got a 10 2 what's this one yeah the other oranges are 10 2 10 gauge 30 amp one of them is 120 volts for the septic system the aerobic septic system dedicated and then i have a 8-2 and another 10-2 and those are for the master whirlpool jet tub the 8-2 is for the tub itself and the pump and motors and for the jets and the 10-2 is for the supplemental heater now you may be asking yourself what kind of tub did you get that requires that much uh you know that would pull that match current well in truth it doesn't uh but because this the tub and the panel are literally on the opposite side of the house so per the manufacturer's instructions this is why you read instructions they recommended up sizing the conductors uh two sizes if you're over 50 feet i think i can't remember the exact numbers but we were over so what was normally a 12 gauge 20 amp circuit is now an 8 gauge and what was normally a 14 gauge 15 amp circuit is now a 10 gauge so they'll still be breakered at you know 20 amps and 15 amps respectively but we upsize the conductors to deal with the voltage drop so we don't have an excessive voltage drop going that long of a distance so let's uh just kind of pan around and see what i've done in these rafters we let the conductors run wild you don't bundle these things that will generate heat heat is bad for electricity it you know starts fires and stuff so the more air movement the better so you actually let these run wild even though it's a little messy i mean it's within code and uh plenty of airflow around them um and just kind of walk in the house you'll see the how we actually run all this stuff you basically run a uh for a given circuit and let's pick a simple one let's pick the uh let's pick the garage fridge and freezer i think that's a simple one so what we did well now i gotta find it yeah so we went out of the panel up along these rafters here above the mechanical room we made a turn we went through here and then we came down down down down into our first outlet here and i labeled everything i can't stress you want to label everything and don't use abbreviations too much because you will forget you will forget and then be scratching your head trying to figure out what does this mean and my buddy who might be watching knows exactly what i'm talking about so i went verbose with my labeling i learned my lessons from him thank you so here we have garage fridge hr home run that goes to the panel and then i have going out from the outlet garage fridge c c for center so garage fridge here to the center outlet i've garage fridge l garage fridge r so left center right you make up your own naming convention in this case this is the last outlet so there's only one one wire coming out that's basically how you wire a circuit all the other circuits in the house are the same thing just longer bigger et cetera um i ran so here's my example i ran all the garage outlets in the mechanical room and the laundry no garage outlets a mechanical room on one circuit for the outlets um the laundry has to be on its own dedicated circuit all the outlets here so like that outlet there he goes up right and around and around and down to this outlet right and then to this outlet right and then down to here so um what else did i do i ran three receptacle circuits for the downstairs for all the outlets and then i ran lighting circuits i basically did a garage and outdoor and laundry then i did it downstairs for the rest of it and i did an upstairs and that's not a lot of lighting but led lights are a thing now and they don't draw much power so you really don't need it i could probably get away with less circuits than that but i just ran more for convenience so let's quickly talk about lights the simplest way to wire this all right is you have power coming into the switch box from somewhere right and it follows the same kind of logic as the receptacles you get power into the box you take power out okay and then you'll have a switch in here and then you have a lead going from your switch to your light and like i said labeling right so in this case i've got power in from the guest wall switch i have power going out to feed the bathroom and then i've got what's called your switch leg going up to my light and it goes up to my light and i just have it hanging out you know right there so for this first step of roughing all these romexes are just left long code says you need at least six inches coming out of the box do more you'll have some waste accept it and know that you will never have anything too short except that you're gonna have some waste don't try to skimp on this stuff yeah wire well used to be cheap but it's still it's cheaper than having to redo the whole thing or having a lot of frustrations because your wires are too short so that's how a simple switch works wiring fans this is another common common issue with a fan you run what's called 14 3 so in this case it has an extra red conductor white black red and so that runs up to just your fan box and so that way they should the you basically have two switches connected to this and they share share the neutral the white typically blacks for the light reds for the fan and uh yeah that's how you run those um another common scenario is what's called a three-way switch and i'm gonna see if i can find an example oh here's an example so a three-way switch you'll have power coming into the box okay so uh in this case here we go there's lower lights home run so this power is coming in then we send we so that's power coming in that we connect that incoming power to one side of our three-way switch to the power inside and then we connect this 14-3 again to the other side of our three-way switch and then the the black and the red are called travelers again i'm not going to explain how all that works in detail there are other youtube videos way better than that for me to you know that i could do i'm just telling you that this exists i'm telling you some terms and i would recommend checking out the plethora of youtubers that do electronics explaining like electrician you and some of the other guys they do a fabulous job way better than i could do so for a three-way switch you run this 14 14-14-3 and it goes all the way over in this case it's going to go over here to this switch box coming in from here here's the other end of the cable that will connect to another three-way switch and then the power side of that three-way switch then goes to the lights in this case it will go to a you know a normal 14-2 that would go in this case running the kitchen lights which i haven't wired just yet and so that um doing that you have two switches that can control the same set of lights so you flip one the light will toggle either on you know off the on on to off and if you go the other switch it will toggle and they ping pong back and forth and most houses have this feature so that is uh that is how that actually works that's how it's wired um you can also have what's called a four-way switch and basically what that does is you have two three-way switches well if you put another type of switch in the middle they call it a four-way you just connect that 14-3 to one side of that switch it's got an extra terminal connect another 14 three to the other side and then you can put as many of those as you want in your kind of loop so you could have you know n number of switches controlling the same light um in my case i've i've got that for um for a lot of the like the living room lights so i've got the living room lights uh where are we going we start here over here by the entry right we've got power coming in all right and we've got our first three leg that'll connect to our three-way switch and that goes over to this switch box that is from here that will connect to one side of our four-way switch the other side of our four-way switch will go to this one all right and then that takes it all the way over here to the side of our three-way switch and then our power out from the three-way switch goes up to the light if you notice i adopted the convention really of using directions so in that case living north so that's the living room north box and i know because it's white i know it's a switchbox not an outlet we don't get those confused all right so north northeast you know master west you know fan outdoor right laundry west so you can see use verbose labels it will help you in the long run um guys i think that's almost about oh let's talk about smoke detectors because that goes along with all this too that's the last thing we'll talk about in wiring so basically what you do is you start with one smoke detector get power to it just with your 14 2 cable and they can be on their dedicated circuit they could be on a different uh you know tapping off of another circuit i chose to put mine on the lighting circuit just because breakers are expensive for these modern arc fault gfi breakers and so the smokes don't need to be on their own decade circuit they don't draw any power so i just put it on the lower lighting circuit so i've got you see the thinner cable there i've got power going in and then the 14 3 again using that as a fatter cable those connect to all the other smoke detectors and so if you ever looked at a wire smoke detector they've got black for power white for the neutral and return and then they use the red wire as a communication wire to each other as an alarm wire so that that mean that's how it works where when one smoke detector goes off they all go off and that's that's how that's accomplished so very important to get that right with the right wires um i guess the other thing i'll talk about just for from budgeting your own project um so this house right my two-story house five-bedroom um i think the square footage is going to be around 3 600. and for all of this wiring i used for all the outlets oh i should also mention outdoor outlets i tapped off the nearest outlet wherever i could find it on whatever circuit i made it easy on myself so i would save some cable so uh for all the 12.2 that i used i used approximately i used over 2500 feet of 12.2 um for the 14 2 i have used about the same almost 2 500 i actually probably a little more than 2500 feet um 14 3 i bought a thousand foot spool of 14.3 and i have i'd probably have about 100 feet left maybe a little more and then for the other odds and ends you know the dedicated circuits um i used oh for all that 10-2 i used about 300 feet at 10-2 and then 100 or so for that 8-2 for that dedicated circuit and some of that stuff i overbought on like i bought 125 feet of six three and i could have got away with probably 100 or 110 but i didn't want to be short and that's that stuff is expensive where you're just buying it for one run it's not like you really want to have a spool of the extra stuff lying around because it's just too expensive to have so uh but maybe they'll give you an idea of kind of what to budget based on your size of your project um i definitely uh undershot mine but that's all right this is a learning opportunity oh let's also talk about grounding um because i know with an electrical video it seems that uh you guys are really really interested in grounding especially if i don't mention it correctly uh so let's talk grounding so this panel is going to be a sub panel uh coming off the shop like we've talked about earlier so it will have it will have no bond screw notice we do not have a bond screw i i threw that thing in the spare parts bin as soon as i got this panel just to make sure it never got installed so and we have ground bars all right there on the other side and then uh i went ahead you see the green uh four gauge aluminum i i bonded those two bars together so we had something beyond just the metal case to actually bond the ground bars together just because because i had i mean it's scrap wire why not so for grounding and bonding on this thing for starters i have let's hear i've got basically three wires for grounding the first and and i would wager probably the most important is the eufer so we talked about the eufer and oh this hvac ducting in the way see our rebar coming out of the uh the wall there right so i've got just a clamp here and yes i'm touching wires there's no power into this uh house at all so just to let everybody know and then we have a number four copper coming off of that that's what that's what's required for the eufer um black wire i taped it with green tape to denote a a ground i think that is required by code on number four and larger uh conductors to identify it if if the jacket isn't color-coded and that goes all the way back to the panel so you can see it going all the way back to the panel okay and we just hit the ground bar and i chose to use a lug for this because it just made it easier than trying to fit this uh four uh number four wire into there the the ground bar says it'll fit and i think it will just fit but uh you gotta hit it perfect and there's not a lot of space here so these ground lugs are cheap and made a lot easier the next where is that the next one is uh right there this number four again number four copper is for the gas bond now i don't think i strictly need to do this but it doesn't hurt um so this bond wire you can see here in the mechanical room what i did oh as i ran it in here and then i tried to make it pretty so i bent a little bit of emt got a discussion all right just running into this conduit i used a nm um transition connector i know it's thn i'm sure it's technically a problem but i just don't care it's it's the cleanest way i could see the transition to protect the cable and everything and so it is bonded to the gas pipe here with this big old connector i think technically for the propane system and natural gas if you're running black pipe like i am you don't have to do this because i think the up the appliances will basically bond and ground themselves through their own circuitry and the piping and so that would be good enough but i went ahead and did that just in case it doesn't hurt and so uh just to make sure i covered all my bases the last piece of bonding that we ran was this number six bear and this could also be a number six you know uh insulated bear was just cheaper and this is for the inner system bonding bridge bar so and that runs again just all the way back to the panel and so what the inner system bonding bridge bar is see it runs right into there and the ground bar that is for all your telecommunication equipment low voltage equipment so your directv satellite dish all your internet providers they have to bond all their equipment and this this number six wire will be hooked to a little a little box on the outside of the house that all those companies can land all of their bonding wires to without having to crack open the panel so it's a it's a way to integrate into the the grounding and bonding system of the house without having to open up the electrical panel and have an electrician do it so it's just a safety thing so that'll be ran over there with the other telecommunication equipment and uh okay so i think that's it now um things that i have not done i have mostly stapled everything uh i still haven't gone through with like nail plates and that kind of stuff to protect all the wires if you drill too close to the edge of a stud you have to put a nail plate in to protect it so the dry wallers don't run a screw through your wires and make everyone have a bad day i'm trying to see if i can find a good example see like right here i think that hole is a little too close i think you have to have an inch and a quarter like you if you're on a three-quarter inch hole i think you've got like a quarter inch plate on either side so in this case i think we are just cl too close to where i probably have to put a plate on that so at least for my project i'm not getting out there with a met with a tape measure or anything if it looks close i'm just gonna nail a plate and move on okay i think that's it now this has been a long video i've been talking a lot so thanks again for watching and we'll see you next video

Channel: Ciband

Views: 29,993

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Id: t9r8Hj1CuDQ

Length: 22min 28sec (1348 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 30 2021