Fixing Ungrounded Outlets by Installing GFCI Outlets- Save THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS

hi i'm mike with morgan inspection services one of the most common problems that i see on a home inspection especially on an older house are electrical outlets that aren't grounded until about 1977 grounding wasn't required so most houses i inspect that are pre-1977 do have ungrounded outlets unless they've been rewired at some point what i want to show you in this video is how to correct an outlet or outlets that are not grounded without having to rewire your whole house that you have three choices basically when you have ungrounded outlets one is rewiring the house which will cost thousands of dollars the second and third options are basically the same and that is installing a ground fault circuit interrupter which basically provides the same amount of safety as if the outlet were grounded before i get too far into it let me explain what the purpose of grounding is let's suppose you have a washing machine and there's a problem with it a wire comes loose on the inside and it's touching the frame of the washing machine well that entire washing machine will now be energized and if somebody walks up to it and touches it to put a load of laundry in it or whatever they have the potential to be electrocuted so when you have a grounded outlet basically you have a ground wire running from that washing machine back to the electric panel so the very second that that wire comes loose and touches the frame a high current is sent back to the panel through that ground wire or the equipment grounding conductor and that causes the breaker to trip killing power to the washing machine and thus it's no longer a danger to electrocute people so that's what grounding does for you well you can achieve essentially the same thing by installing a ground fault circuit interrupter it's not going to cause a breaker to trip but if there is ever a ground fault which is basically an unintentional short circuit to ground and that could be current flowing through a person which could cause electrocution the ground fault circuit interrupter will trip and kill power to that outlet and therefore protect someone from being electrocuted so that's what grounding and ground fault circuit interrupters do so let me show you what we're going to do okay so we're in this house it's a vacant house i chose it because it's a lot easier to work with and if you look here this one light indicates that this is an ungrounded outlet i've checked all these outlets in this room they're all ungrounded one light so this entire room is full of ungrounded outlets and most likely all these outlets are on the same circuit so you what will happen is one of these outlets and normally it's going to be the outlet closest to the breaker panel the breaker panels out this way so i'm suspecting it's either this outlet here or this outlet here that's the first one in the chain so assuming it's this one you'll have the power coming from the panel to this outlet and another wire running from that outlet to this outlet another wire running from this outlet to that outlet and so on so every outlet except the last one in the chain should have two wires to it so what we're going to do is figure out which is the first outlet in the chain and then we're going to install a ground fault circuit interrupter on that outlet and that gfi will then protect all the other outlets and it'll make it basically just as safe as if all the outlets were grounded okay so we've turned the breaker off and i'm about to start figuring out where the circuit comes into this room where the power comes in and we'll know which outlet it is we need to replace with the gfi one thing i also want to say is you can do this one of two ways you can either replace the the first outlet in the chain or you can put in a ground fault circuit interrupter breaker in the breaker panel and i'm not going to get into that but that is certainly an option gfi breakers run around 50 to 60 dollars if you feel comfortable with electrical work and if you've ever messed with breakers that's certainly an option for you but again i'm not getting into that in this video i want to show you how to do the ground fault circuit interrupter outlet so let's get started what i want to do now is start finding the first outlet in the chain and as you can see we have turned power off this is dead before i mess with anything i do want to double check that there's absolutely no power in here so i've got my little voltage detector and it is showing that this is dead so i'm going to pull this out of the wall [Music] okay and sure enough there are two sets of wires on this this outlet just to double check and also to show you how you can find the last outlet in the chain i'm going to come over here and i'm not going to pull it out but by looking in there i can see only one set of wires so this will be the only or the last outlet in this room so it is almost certain that this here is the first outlet in the chain and what i'm going to do to prove that is i'm gonna take the two wires loose i'm gonna just double check again always makes me nervous okay so i'm gonna have to cut these wires loose [Music] i'll go ahead and cut it all this why not okay so these two go together and these two go together and what i'm going to do is turn the power back on and then we're going to see which one of these is the hot and which one is the one that uh feeds the next outlet in the chain so i'll be right back okay so we've got the power back on and what i'm going to do is just use my voltage detector to determine which ones of which one of these wires is the hot one and just because the breaker box is back this way these two come into the box from this direction i'm guessing it's this one and it is this one has no power so this is the one getting power from the breaker panel then this one will be feeding the outlet over there one thing i want to explain to you because this was fairly easy to determine which one is the first one in the chain but if this one weren't the first one in the chain let's say i had started uh down in the middle of the room let's say i had there wasn't so obvious let's say i started on this one what i would have done is take both of the black wires loose from this outlet here and i then would have turned the power back on and check for those two wires of which one is hot and if one of them is hot i would then go back to one of the other two leaving those two loose let's say i come here and then i'll do the same thing i take the two black wires loose from this outlet and check and see if one of them is hot and if neither of them were hot then i'd go around this way the other way take two wires loose and one of those would have to be hot if on the other end it wasn't but now that we know this one would have been hot here because we know the power is coming from this direction but you just take two wires or the wires loose from one outlet at a time and you just keep going back tracing the hot until you find where it ends and that's that's how you figure out which outlet is the first one in the chain so now that we know that this one is the first one in the chain what we're going to do is hook up this ground fault circuit interrupter to it but let me show you something on this so almost all of these will come with yellow tape attached i don't know if you can read this but it says and then under here it would say load line means that's the power coming in from the the breaker panel this is going to be where you connect the live wires any receptacles that you want to protect with this gfi will be connected under here but the hot wires will be connected to the ones that's not covered by the tape the one that's labeled line and as you can see you've got a gold screw and a silver screw the hot wire the black wire will always connect to the gold screw the the white or neutral wire will always connect to the silver screw so i'm going to kill the power and we'll be right back okay so we've got the power turned off i'm just double checking before i touch any of these wires and i'm just gonna strip a little bit of insulation off of each of them give me a little more off of that one okay so here's my gfi this is the wire that brings the power in so it's going to go under this gold screw the one that's not covered by the tape the one that says line so these gfi's are very easy to install because you don't have to twist the wire put it under a screw you just slide it in there okay and the neutral also you'll do the same thing with the neutral okay you always want to get these wires nice and tight because you definitely don't want to lose connection okay so these are the two wires that feed the other outlets so now we'll remove the tape and they have these screws tightened to make just so you can remember that that's not where the first wire goes okay so just gonna hook this black wire up under the this gold screw and the white wire let me loosen this one again white wire again goes under the silver screw yeah i like using power tools instead of hand tools maybe i'm a little bit lazy okay so now we have our gfi and hopefully it will fit into this box [Applause] okay so we're basically done i thought of everything for this video except bringing a cover plate for a gfi outlet but what i'm gonna do now we're gonna turn the power on and just make sure that uh this works and that it protects all these other outlets so i'll be right back okay so we've got the power turned back on and obviously the outlet uh looks like it has no power i haven't reset it yet okay so it is it does have power and let's check these others to make sure they're working power it's live i'm not going to go through all the others but we know if these two are good it's going to continue around because they worked earlier now what i want to do is trip this make sure it's dead and then make sure that these are also which they are so now this entire room is essentially as safe as if we had run new wiring through the walls with the ground wire okay so there's one last thing you need to do you need to have your receptacles properly labeled so this one obviously is ground fault protected because it's a gfi outlet but all the others in the room look like just regular outlets so what you need to do these labels will come in every box of gfis that you purchase so as you can see here it says ground fault protected outlet no equipment ground you need both of those labels to go on the other outlets in the room okay so now it's marked as ground fault protected no equipment ground so that's totally up to code and i'll put labels on these others here in a minute i sure appreciate you watching hope you learned something if you have any questions or comments please leave them below and i'll do my best to respond thank you [Music] you

Channel: Morgan Inspection Services

Views: 107,633

Keywords: fix ungrounded outlets, install gfci outlet, install gfcis, installing gfci, fixing ungrounded outlets diy, Replace ungrounded outlets

Id: psPMqlHxrEs

Length: 16min 53sec (1013 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 11 2020