How to Add an Electrical Outlet for a Wall Mounted TV

[Music] [Applause] hi I'm Nils and in a recent video I showed how to hide the wires on a wall-mounted TV like this so it turned out great everything looks good it only costs ten dollars to do click here to check out the link on how to do that now when I did that I didn't realize that per local code and this may be the case with the code in your area you can't put high-voltage wires behind the walls and in the way that I did you can put low-voltage wires like HDMI cords AV cables and audio cables things like that but the actual plug for the television itself needs a separate outlet so today we're going to show you how to do that this applies to adding an outlet to your bathroom adding an outlet in your kitchen your garage anywhere like that and what we're gonna do is we're gonna run a new outlet off of an existing outlet in the house on a completely finished area we're gonna do this without having to cut into the sheetrock and without making a mess or painting or anything like that we'll cut into the sheetrock just to put the new outlet but we won't have to do any muddying or taping that kind of stuff so let's go ahead and take a look at the tools that we're going to need to get started and don't be overwhelmed there's quite a few but most of them are fairly inexpensive simple tools and all of them won't end up costing you too much money in the end so let's take a look at that all right so the tools you're gonna need and supplies that you're going to need to do this we're going to need a stud finder we're gonna need faceplate an outlet and then a couple of single gain boxes and these guys are the kind that are for existing work not for new work so they have these little tabs that grab on to the drywall we're gonna need two of those we're gonna need some romex wiring and you'll need the amount that you'll need is about however much the distances from the existing outlet that you're tapping off of to the new outlet so in my case it's only about four feet I've got seven or eight just to be safe you're gonna need some wire strippers and wire cutters and this is just a kind of kind that I got at a fair that I really like any wire strippers will do then you're gonna need either a voltage tester or a multimeter if you've got one to make sure that the power is out and we're not working with live wires drywall saw or a utility knife will do the trick as well so whichever you've got handy and then we are also going to use larger screwdriver or a pry bar to pry the existing outlet away from the stud and then we've also got the drill or screwdriver just whatever to take care of the screws there and then last couple of things we've got fish tape this is probably not going to be necessary if they're if you're not working through insulation or other things in my case I don't think I'm even going to need this but you may need fish tape along with that you'll want some electrical electrical tape and then if you want to you can get one of these guys for three bucks at Harbor Freight that just does the extending magnet to grab on to the fish tape off the other side and then lastly we've got our two things we've got our lights so that we can work in the dark because we're gonna have to power the outlets off and then we've got a reciprocating saw or if you don't have a reciprocating or saw or sawzall you can use a hacksaw that'll do the trick too so let's let's go ahead and start with the work now okay the first thing we want to do is use the stud finder to make sure the area between our existing outlet which is this one here and our new outlet is clear so just we'll take a look we're gonna run this up the wall and I expect we'll find a little bit of electricity or currency running through like that but we're just going to test to make sure there's no studs if there is a fire block in there then we're gonna want to be aware of that and that's something that's gonna make this job a lot more difficult you'll have to actually you might actually have to cut in or you'll have to do pumpkin cuts around the stud finder or excuse me around the fire block and that can make things pretty difficult but it doesn't mean it's that this job still can't be done so I'm just gonna run this up the rest of the way up to where the outlets gonna go and we'll make sure everything is looking good okay our next step is going to be to remove this and I've already tested with my multimeter to make sure that there's no electricity going through here so I'm gonna pull this out and you may or may not have a lot of slack here every setup is gonna be a little bit different and also what it looks like in the back is going to be different in my case I've got all of the wires are going directly into the push in inputs here and so I'm gonna have to get those guys out and then I've got my on the green screw as always now this type of wire these aren't actually meant to come out I mean these are kind of a one-way thing you put them in and then they hold on real tight so you can try some of them actually have a little release on the back that you can insert a pin or something into like a small screwdriver this one doesn't have that and so I think we're just gonna try to wriggle these guys out and then if we can't get them out all the way we can always cut them off but prefer to get them out if we can and they actually do come out a little bit okay the next part we're actually going to see if we can get this outlet out of the wall and so this is where if you have a pry bar that's going to come in handy I'm gonna use this larger Philips sorryi flat-head screwdriver I know the stud is on this side and so I'm just gonna usually what happens is they're nailed into the wall so I'm going to get close to the top and the bottom and see if I can get a little slack I want to be careful not to mess up the drywall here okay and I don't need to get all the way out I just need to get it loosened a little bit give myself a little slack there we go okay we're ready to go ahead and cut the nails there's one nail just on the bottom about an inch back going into the stud right here and I brought a one nail on the top about an inch back going on the stud and I've just got a general-purpose saw blade on my reciprocating saw so let's see if we can get these nails out okay there's one and two and you see the Box just went slack there so that means we got it okay the purpose of doing that is so that we can pull this guy out and then get our wires free so that we can work with them now that I've got these out I'm going to take one of my new work boxes first of all you want to make sure that the flaps or the tabs that you've got here I want to make sure that these are all gonna fit in the hole okay and that when they open up they're not gonna be against the wall or anything like that so if you had one that was going this way for example that wouldn't work against the stud because that would be in the way my studs on this side so I'm gonna pop out these little the little tabs here give myself something to work with go and I do the same thing on the other side and feed these guys in and that's about all we need for this we're just gonna get it to the point where it's accessible the new white or the old wires are in and then we're gonna go ahead and start on the top we're gonna drop the old the new romex wire this stuff we're gonna drop this down and have it and feed it down right into here and then tie it in with this stuff okay now up top behind the TV here we're gonna I know I've got this wall mount mounted on to the stud which is the same stud down below that I had the actual that the old outlet on so I just need to trace where my new outlet is gonna be and this is gonna be behind the TV so I don't have to get it perfect necessarily of course I do want it to look good I'm just gonna make sure I get it straight and then I'm just gonna trace around the box and then once I've got that up I'll use my my jab saw here to cut out this hole okay so for my next step I took my romex wire and then I went ahead and stripped off the pieces on the top on the bottom I didn't strip them because I wanted to be able to fish him down with that I'm getting sprayed or splayed and in the way and I was able to there's a pipe behind here but I was able to get it past there and there we go so now I've got both ends out I'm gonna go ahead and splice these guys up and feed them through this box like we talked about before and then once those are in there I can cap them together to connect the electricity okay so I've got the wires through and now I'm actually gonna need to make a new connection gonna use the wire connectors here to connect two sets of wires here I need a little bit of extra wire to do that so I'm gonna take my wire cutters I've got plenty extra up here so I'm just gonna grab a section of this and then strip off the ends and then let's take I'll show you a closer up what we're doing here okay so I've stripped that section I just cut I just stripped off about a half inch off the ends both ends of each of these and then of course the ground is already bare so now I'm gonna take my wire connectors and just connect the so one of this one right here is coming in from the upper outlet that we're about to install so I'm going to connect that to one of the existing ones along with a third guy here and I'm just gonna use a standard pair of pliers to twist these guys together there we go and then we're going to slip a cap on and tighten it down there real good to make sure that the connection is solid between all three of these and what that leaves us with is just one two to put it into the actual outlet itself so we're gonna do what you need to remember is that black goes on brass so you've got your brass side and your silver side so black goes on brass white goes on silver and then your ground goes on green which is down here let's see your ground is this guy over here so your bare ground goes on grease so we're gonna wire this back up kind of like we had it before we're just not going to use the holes in the back to do that okay we're all wired up on the bottom outlet now so again I've got my three-way connectors that I did I've got my black going into brass and then the white going into silver here and then the ground I've connected all the grounds and just put them into the one ground screw there and so now we can go ahead and cram all this back in there you go outlet lined up our box put back into place okay once that's ready we can go ahead and put back our like inside the drill this is going to flip the tab up and start to pull it against there's this clutch locks in place there we go I just felt snugging in there do the same thing down here okay now we're gonna tighten these screws down and then we'll put our plate back on it will be all set down here alright we've got our outlet back on down there and now we're gonna work on got lit up here up here we're really gonna do the same thing we're gonna get the wire stripped and get the ends of it exposed we're gonna feed it in through this box and then we're gonna wire it up to our outlet wherever I put that and get the outlet mounted in get the box mounted in and the tabs pulled nice and tight against the drywall put the faceplate on and then we should be all set so let's get this thing wrapped up one important thing before I forget I did cut this wire a lot shorter we didn't need an extra foot and a half hanging off there there's no way you'd be able to cram that all in the box so I cut it to a reasonable length and then also do little hooks on the ends of your wires so that they can wrap around the screws and this you're gonna push them right into the inputs in the back if you're gonna do it on the screws just do a little wire around or wrap around it like a little hook and that way when you attach it as you tighten it it's going to be tightening this hook down and not trying to slip away from you so that makes life a little bit easier one last item on this if you're wondering before we had both screws with wires going to them and if you're wondering which ones to put it in now they're both connected so it doesn't actually matter you can put on the top or the bottom just again make sure your black is going to the brass and White's going to the silver and ground to the green and then we're going to go ahead and put this thing in and wrap it up and there we have it so we've got our outlet ready to go and last thing we're gonna do is we're gonna turn on the power test it make sure everything is working good and then we'll get everything cleaned up and put back away okay so we are all done we've got our new outlet installed we didn't have to do any dry walling or taping or anything we just cut the hole as you saw and ran off our existing outlet down here so it worked out really nicely our power is up everything's working I've got the TV on here and move this arm there we go and we're up and running so if you have any comments or ways to improve what I've done I'm not a professional electrician I'm a guy who likes to figure things out and do it myself so hopefully this helps you if you have any comments or suggestions improvements feel free to let me know in the comments below click to subscribe there's gonna be some other videos that you can take a look at and I'd love for you to watch them so thanks for watching I'm Nils and good luck [Music] [Applause] you

Channel: LRN2DIY

Views: 2,064,455

Keywords: nils, nilsandkatrina, how-to, outlet, electrical outlet, Television (Invention), tv, add, additional, wall mounted tv, wall, mounted, put, plug, high voltage

Id: pe6H9sZMkhA

Length: 14min 17sec (857 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 05 2015