Garage Receptacle Wiring - How To Wire A Garage For Electricity

in today's video i'm going to show you how to wire the garage that you see here behind me and if you're new to this channel my name is josh this channel is all about building your own house saving a ton of money so be sure to subscribe ring that bell so you get a notification every time i release my video and hammer that like button for me that's all i ask return for making this video so before i get started running the wires i want to take you through garage wiring 101 so let's get started welcome to garage wiring 101. this is going to be six common rules or codes that are going to be used while wiring your garage and always check your local building codes to see what you need to do to wire your garage but in my area these are the ones that are enforced and they're common practices as far as i know but again always check your local building codes so the first thing is receptacles and lights on a separate circuit on two different circuits and the reason why that is is if you're using an outlet in your garage and it throws the breaker you still have your lights above and also while we're talking about it bathrooms are the same way right now so it's very important to have those on two different circuits but your outlets or your receptacles must be on its own circuit by itself with nothing else you can't have garage outlets mixed with your bedroom outlets for instance it has to be on its own circuit and that brings me to the next thing is receptacles must be on a 20 amp circuit so for a 20 amp circuit to be achieved you must use what's called 12 wire and this is 12 gauge wire and you can only use a 20 amp breaker with 12 gauge wire you cannot use 14 wire because 14 wire is too small of a gauge it's only for 15 amps so use a 20 amp circuit for your outlets and three receptacles on a gfi and you can do this via either a breaker that's a gfi breaker or you can use a gfi outlet and then use that to your first outlet and it's going to put a gfi protection on the remaining outlets for instance i can show you when we go to wire this garage the example but if you're if your hammer on is coming from your breaker box to the out first outlet if that one's a gfi outlet it protects all the other outlets on that same circuit so you can't put your gfi on the last outlet because it only protects that last outlet so whatever outlet you come to and the ones thereafter are going to be protected on a gfi if you use gfi outlet in that case the next rule in my area is receptacle must be placed in each vehicle bay so what this means is what it says you just have to have one receptacle in each vehicle bay so if you have two bay garage you got to make sure there's at least the receptacle in each one of those bays i personally run more than that i run it just about like a bedroom i run them about every six to eight foot apart so that way there's gonna be an outlet readily available if i need it so that's for me personally but check with your local building codes to see how often you need to have a receptacle in your garage and number five receptacles cannot be higher than 66 inches on the wall so this is pretty common pretty much common sense obviously you don't want a receptacle way up here and have to plug in where you can't reach it but i figured i'd mention that because it is the code in my area and notice it says on the wall and it doesn't say on the ceiling because you can run your garage door opener outlet on the same circuit as the outlets around the floor and so you can have it up in the ceiling which i'm going to be doing that because i want to have two garage door openers because i got two garage bays if you've been following my channel i've been building this house you see me frame up the garage door openings and everything so thanks for watching up till this point i appreciate it all right guys let's go back into the garage and start running some wire before i show you how i'm going to wire this garage i want to point out to you that as you can see there's drywall on the ceiling and that's because i had to get these garage doors installed here behind me a few months ago in order to do that we had to get the track up against these trusses and you need the drywall installed ahead of time because you can't do it later so i already ran the wiring for the lights behind the drywall so i'm just going to go ahead and show you the receptacles and just point out a few things before we get started let me show you what i already got done here so i mounted a three gang box here and the reason why there's a three gang so there's gonna be three switches there's gonna be one for inside lights one for the outside lights and then i'm going to put a switch here to control a lamp post outside and another thing i wanted to show you when you have this many wires coming into a box it's always nice to use these wire stackers and these keep your wires looking nice and uniform and you can get these in my amazon store you can check out the link in the description below and i do get a small commission for many purchases but it's at no extra cost to you so this is running up to this single gang box up here and then it bunny hops to that one and then there's one back in the back here then there's one right here in this corner so those are all going to be for the inside lights and then these are the receptacles for the garage door openers one here and then one here so as you can see these are connected or coming down over here so we're going to have to get power over to this 12 2 wire and we're going to do that by coming in from here this is a home run right to the panel box so our power is going to come to an outlet here then we're going to run it to one here then hit the one i just showed you and it's going to go up into the ceiling and it's going to come down on this wall run across then it's going to power all these outlets this is the home run going to the panel box that's going to power all the receptacles around this room so i know there needs to be a receptacle right here as the first receptacle it's going to so i'm going to go ahead and measure up off the floor 18 inches and put a mark and that's going to be the top of our outlet box and that's the same as all the other outlet boxes around the house so i'm going to do that around the whole garage and then i'm going to put an x on the side of the stud in which the outlet box is going to be placed now there's one instance over here on this wall where i can't put it this height and i'm going to show you that when i get to it so i'm going to go ahead and lay out this whole garage and go from there all right you may run into this situation as well i want to put an outlet on this wall of course so i want to go as low as possible and i cannot go any lower than the bottom of this wall if i went any lower i'd have to cut out this band board and i don't want to do that so it's going to be 21 inches to the bottom of my receptacles on this wall which is going to be different than the rest of them which that's okay so let's go ahead and just put an x on the side of the stud that we're going to be putting outlets on so now what i'm going to do is walk around the room and each one of those studs are just marked i want to drop an outlet box in front of it and then i'm going to go through and nail them all up all at once and if you're wondering these are 18 cubic inch single gang boxes and these could easily accept two 12 two wires and the actual outlet as far as the electrical box fill goes if you need any more wires in it than that you're going to have to step up to a 22.5 cubic inch box all right let's go ahead and drop these off and get them nailed up [Music] i'm going to show you how to anchor this outlet box to the stud and if you're watching my channel you see me do this a lot as far as anchoring these but i just wanted to show anybody that hasn't seen my channel before but as you can see here there's little tabs on the sides of the box these little tabs are used as spacers from the studs so drywall can go around it and the box ends up flush so you got to do wherever you marked your box to set go ahead and place it there and right there looks good and then all you got to do is drive the nails into the stud and then grab the bottom one that's all there is to it now go through and nail all these up then i'll start drilling holes for wires [Music] so what i like to do to keep my wires running straight is i like to measure up right off the floor about 24 inches make a mark on the stud so that way when i go to drill my holes in the center of the stud and running nice and straight so the wires aren't all up and down and jagged looking so i'm going to go ahead and do that to all the studs that i need to run wires through and some people have mentioned use a laser level and stuff like that so that's fine too but i'm just going to do this because it's so convenient i already got my tape measure my pen i don't want to run out and grab another tool so let's do it so now to drill the hole i use a 3 8 drill bit and i just hold right in the center of that stud and drill right through it now do that to all the studs that we marked for the path of the wire [Music] so the nice thing about this situation is we can use these holes that were already drilled for this other side of the wall to run our wires through so we're just going to come through here through the same holes and drop down to our outlets so to run the wire it's pretty straightforward just unravel however much wire you need and start fishing it through the holes now there's a couple nuances that you got to do once you get to the outlet and i want to show you that now all right so once you run the wire over to the next outlet what we need to do is make sure we allow at least six inches sticking out its outlet box so what i do i just curl it down around the box leave at least six to eight inches and then i know that's long enough on this end so i'm just going to go ahead and push it into that receptacle box and you've got to take pliers sometimes that punch out the back of these and it just makes it way easier to get the wire started in there and then slide it in and pull it through and now let's go back to the other outlet and cut the wire to length so now on this outlet we do the same thing curl it around the back of the outlet box about six or eight inches cut it to length and whatever you do just make sure you're not too stingy and cut it too short that's really the key here punch out the back of that outlet box and then we just continue running from outlet tablet just like that and i'm not going to staple this yet because i got another wire coming from this end so once you got two wires in an outlet box it's time to staple them and i'm going to use a half inch staple for this 12.2 wire and these can be found in my amazon store there's a link in the description below so you can go check those out but you just nailed this within six inches of the receptacle box per code in my area so go ahead and nail that on snug and that's all there is to it then after you do that just roll these wires up and place them into the box because you need the drywall installed before we do anything else with these wires [Music] now that i got all the receptacles roughed in i'm going to address the lighting and the switches that's why i ran these three wires here beside this 36 inch entry door it's the garage side door so i want to switch one for the inside lights and a switch to operate the outside lights that's right outside this door so i'm going to turn the camera over down here to where the switches are going to be and show you what i'm doing so the first thing i do is measure my switch box height and i'm going to make it 48 inches to the top of the switch box i usually use a permanent marker or a pen it's just easier to see that way and then after i do that the switch box has nails on each side of it just like an outlet box so we're going to go ahead and place that into position to where it goes and be sure you don't hit your wires while you're doing this so i'll just kind of hold them out of the way and just go ahead and nail that into place there's one in the top and there's a nail on the bottom all right now that's nice and secure so now i'm going to place these wires inside of the box that where they came down from the ceiling and this one's coming in from the side so we're actually going to staple all these together or something like that so what i like to do is take something and go ahead and hit this internal clamp and break it loose where each wire is going what i'm going to do now is just fish the wires in the order in which they're coming down the wall here so this one's coming down first and you just got to push that internal clamp so that it opens up and it can be a little uh stiff running these wires back in through here and the next one's gonna be this three wire that's for the three-way switch for the inside lights so same thing and then we're gonna put this one in and the inspector likes to see one wire per slot in the back of this box so try not to double each slot with a wire since our biggest wire is this 12 3 wire i got to use a three quarter inch wire staple so in order to do that we're just going to go ahead and hold all these wires together and then place the staple over the wires and then just drive the staple into the stud and i like to put my wire staples within six inches of my electrical boxes and now the wires already labeled this is the power going to the outside for the outside lights this is the wire going to the outside lights and this is the wire for the three-way switch that's going to operate the inside lights if you need no more details about how to wire a three-way switch check out this video link up above that's going to give you more details it's when i did the hallway in this house and the rough wire on how to do a three-way switch is in that video if i was going to protect the whole circuit using a gfi outlet not a breaker i would have to hook it to this outlet because the power is coming into it so it's going to protect all the outlets thereafter and the one that it's actually connected to so that's why you need to come to your first outlet if you're going to use a gfi outlet instead of a gfi breaker the options to give your garage ground fault protection is the outlet and i explained to you just a moment ago on how that worked but this is one i just wanted to show it to you but what i'm going to use is this breaker it has ground fault protection and arc fault protection built in one and this is 20 amp of course because that's what we need in a garage and i just wanted to show you guys what i'm going to be doing for ground fault protection i'm just going to give you one little final walk through here so this cable coming down from the ceiling is for the three-way switch this one is the power coming in to power the outside light and then this one runs up and over to the outside light and as you can see here we have it stubbed out the wall right there and then as far as the receptacles go they're all powered around the room on the on its own circuit like i mentioned earlier and then over here is our first receptacle that if you're going to use the gfi outlet you got to come to that one first and it's going to charge or protect all of these on the gfi protection around the whole garage and then here are the switches like i mentioned at the beginning of the video this is going to be to control all the lights and the outside lamp posts right there and all these lights are on a separate circuit and all the receptacles are on its own circuit if you have any comments or questions about this project be sure to leave them in the comment section below and i'll get to them as soon as possible and again be sure to check out my amazon store for any of the products you see me using in this video and i want to say thanks a lot for watching be sure to subscribe hammer that like button and i'll see you in the next video have a good one

Channel: The Excellent Laborer

Views: 224,101

Keywords: how to, how to wire a garage, how to install 220 volt in your garage, garage, how to wire, how to wire an outlet, how to add outlet, garage wiring, wiring new outlets in garage, how to wire outlet, how to install a new circuit breaker and outlet, how to install a garage consumer unit, how to add outlet in garage, how to add more outlets in garage, how to wire in 220, how to wire a shed, garage outlet installation, wire, electricity, electrical

Id: 4__yViV0BVs

Length: 16min 33sec (993 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 24 2021