Fixing Ungrounded Outlets - An Alternative Option to Rewiring Your Home

every one mark from top homeowner today we're going to talk about what you can do if you have outlets in your house that aren't rounded without having to resort to rewiring your house okay so and some older homes you'll have run to the problem they have outlets that are just the two pronged outlets which are now let's without the ground so instead of looking like a happy face it only looks like you have a couple of eyes right in a couple spots for for the power outlets so a lot of people it becomes problematic especially for new modern equipment it has to those electronics have to have three prongs in order to be able to plug in so some people will replace the outlets with outlets to have the ground built in but the outlets themselves aren't rounded and that can cause problems especially when it comes time to actually resell a home and it could be a code violation as well so real quick and disclaimer here I'm not an electrician so make sure you follow all your safety precautions and if you don't feel like you're qualified enough to do this on your own be sure to contact a qualified a licensed electrician but that said this is something that we learned that can you can do to help get round this issue without having to rewire your house so if you take a look here this outlet down here is one of the free prong outlets right it looks like a happy face and you notice at the top it says no ground and that's because even though that outlet has that third prong here this this prong at the bottom it does not have a ground in place and so if we test the outlet with this tester you'll see that it doesn't line up because we kill the power to this outlet okay so I'll look at that so what you'll see if you test the outlet on this tester here it'll say open ground it won't light up where it's supposed to which is this down here which is correct which means it's wired the correct way and it's grounded and so that's what you'll see on these outlets unfortunately I can't show you because we already killed the power to this outlet so what you can do to get around having you rewire your entire house is you can install GFCI outlets and no GFCI outlets are designed to help protect a home especially in wet conditions so if you have outlets in your kitchen or if you have outlets in your bathroom those outlets will be GFCI outlets and I'll show you what it looks like here in a second but basically what they do is they help protect there's any kind of a ground fault circuit interrupter is what you have see yeah it stands for and it'll actually kill the power to that circuit so what we're gonna be doing is we're gonna be replacing the first outlet in the room with a GFCI outlet which will then protect the other outlets that that is wired off of so we'll get into that and I'll show you what that looks like here in a second okay so this is a normal outlet you see it has the three prongs ground neutral and the hot wire and it just looks like this that's just a your standard typical outlet a GFCI outlet looks like this and there's some actual circuitry and built into it and you'll see it has here a reset and a test button that makes sure that your circuit is your outlet is working properly you can test it and reset it in case it trips so we're gonna be replacing this with this on the outlet that is the first on a run in a room and so what that means is basically the power that's coming into a room itself that is going to the first outlet that's going to be available is going to be this one and then the other outlets in the room will be powered off of this one so it will protect any of the outlets in a room just because this one is in place okay so what we're gonna do first is we're gonna make sure that the power in this room is off and so what we've done is we've gone ahead and referred back to our handy-dandy circuit breaker index that we've created and this is a free template that you can get off of top homeowner comm just visit Telecom your top homeowner comm and you can download this for yourself and so what we're gonna do now is we've already killed the power but we're gonna confirm that the power is actually off so we're going to use a circuit tester here and make sure so we put this in over here it doesn't beep which means the powers off okay so that's off so what we have to do is have to figure out what the first outlet we have to figure out what the first outlet in on the run is in the room and so what we're going to do is we're going to pull off one of these outlets see how it's wired and then we're going to pull off another outlet and see if it looks like it's at the end of a run and I'll show you what that looks like okay so what this shows is that there's this is not the end of a run because you have to sew different sets of wires coming into this outlet it could be that this is in the middle of a run or this could be the very first outlet on the run into this room so we won't know until we disconnected and test it and then we also need to find out where the in run is in this room just so we know who are on the right track also this it looks like it's grounded properly because this is a ground green ground wire here that's going in and actually connected to this metal box in here but that is not grounded someone just installed this wire thinking probably that that would take care of it but it doesn't it actually has to be have a ground wire in the wiring itself that runs all the way back to the electrical panel where the power comes into your home so this even though it looks like it's grounded it's not grounded and we confirm that with the electrical tester that we plugged into the outlet earlier so you'll see this outlet is a little bit different than the last one you've only got two wires going into that and so that shows that this is the last outlet on a run because there's only two wires coming in to that outlet and there's not another two wires coming out of the outlet going somewhere else so this is the end of the run this is on the other side of the room so that first outlet that we picked on the on the first side of the room I'm pretty sure that's where the power comes in so what we're going to do is we're going to disconnect it and then we're going to turn the power back on and test it safely and see if it still disconnects the power to the other outlets and if it does we'll know that's the first first outlet in the run and that's where we need to put our GFCI outlet a so sometimes on outlets you'll unscrew these side terminals to get the wires removed or to install a new wires and others you'll have to you'll come across this where these wires are actually plugged in to the back and like these quick connect terminals and so what you'll need to do is to remove it you'll need to stick something down in this port here that will release the spring and then you can pull the wire out okay so we we have removed the outlet and separated the wires now if you look inside here you'll see where these two wires are together on one side of the outlet box these two wires are together on this side Valley box so we have to do now is determine where the power is coming into the room if it's coming into the room through these two wires or if it's coming into these two wires so the reason why we have these separated so much is because we're gonna actually actually have to turn the power onto the circuit we want to make sure it doesn't work so again if you're doing this make sure you're comfortable with working with electricity and make sure that you you know are not and don't put yourself in a position where you're gonna get electrocuted obviously but what we'll do here is we'll turn the power on will use a tester to see where the power is coming in in the room and then we'll be able to determine which power which wires actually are carrying the power and which ones are powering the rest of the room okay so here's our testing pen right so basically it should be these black wires that are that become hot when the power is applied to the circuit but we're going to test both of these anyway all these anyway just to be sure but what we're gonna do is we're gonna flip the breaker back on on the circuit and we're gonna see which one of these wires lights up as to where the power is coming into the room so flip them in a circuit breaker back on and not that one it's this one here okay this should be neutral so that shouldn't have why should not have power coming into it but black duct okay and so now that we know which line is hot what we're going to do is we need to hook up the the line side the side where the power is coming from to these outlets here and again we can either use this the set screws to install it or we can use these basically slots to slide the wires into and then tighten it down on this and then on the other side where there's no power we need to hook it up to the load and that's going to protect the other outlets okay so now we have the GFCI outlet installed you can see here the light shows that it's being protected if we hit the test button we can see if the other outlet gets disabled which it should so the other outlet that it's protecting is this one over here so you can see the light is on it so let me go ahead and come back over here and hit the test button it's tripped and if you look back over here at that outlet the light is no longer on so reset this and it's lit okay so that's it for this video hopefully you found that informative if you have any questions please be sure to leave a comment below and I will try to answer those questions as soon as I can also if you liked the video don't forget to hit the like button and be sure to subscribe to our Channel thanks and we'll see you next time

Channel: Top Homeowner

Views: 874,325

Keywords: how to, home improvement, two prong receptacle, ground wire, two prong receptacles, replace your old two prong receptacle, GFCI, rewire house, rewire home, gfci outlet installation, gfci outlet, gfci install, rewire house without tearing out walls, rewire house electrical, wiring, repair, electrical, electric, ground, plug, outlet, grounding, electrician, how to deal with, how to ground an outlet without a ground wire, two prong to three prong outlet, top homeowner, tophomeowner

Id: bDqO2IImumY

Length: 10min 6sec (606 seconds)

Published: Fri May 10 2019