How to change a 120v to 240v outlet | Handyman

all right guys it's ron with ron comes in handy and i'm giving you guys another video that has to do with electrical so disclaimer i am not a certified licensed electrician so all your electrical questions please consult electrician i'm just a handyman with that being said let's get to this video now if you guys don't know i am a handyman or not a handyman my bad i i'm handyman on the side but i work at an apartment complex where i'm a maintenance tech and i do a lot of this work um so what we got going on today is that we just remodeled this uh apartment and if you guys look at my video i'm gonna put up in the top right corner these originally these were built in 1964 and we have these um fuse boxes they're not breakers they're fuse boxes so i guess back then they use fuse boxes but we had a contractor come in a real electrician came in and they upgraded the box to a breaker box right so we have these so we have what we got going on today is the ac is not working uh oh i took this off i didn't put the screws in so the ac is not working the ac is right here so let's turn these guys on right let's close this i'm gonna take it off later hopefully it stays don't do that so we replace the ac if you guys saw it it said 20 amps and so when we go here and try to plug it in no power usually there's a light right here it doesn't work we have right here it says it requires 240 volt now before this was like a 120 volt but you know i guess they bought the wrong ac and it bought it as a 240 volt but you know over in the breaker oh and the reason why we upgraded the uh the breaker box or the fuse box is because we're adding a washer and dryer and so they needed to upgrade it so why is the ac not giving no power at all nothing and the answer is what i just found out recently is let's actually take this off so remember these two right here is the ac so let's cut them off and they're 20 amps right so we take these off you can see what they usually do when you want to get 240 volts is that you take the neutral wire which is this guy right here and it's usually on this bar right here the silver bar that's where the other ones are at so you take oh they're right here in my bed they're right here this silver bar so you take the neutral and you put it into a slot for the breaker this circuit right here and you post it mark it black or i think red to show that this is now not neutral it is live on your power line so now you have two one two the black and then the white that's um that's black marked as 120 volt and another 124 that's 240 but we're not getting any power why is that because they're on the same leg or the same side i don't know the technical term but what an electrician told me is that if you're trying to get 240 volts and you have them they can't be on the same side because if they're on the same side they cancel each other out so that's why we're not getting no power over there so what we need to do we're going to take this white wire and we're going to put it actually over here we actually have a free slot right here with this 20 amp i don't know why they didn't do that before but we're going to do that right now but before i touch all this i'm gonna go to the main power box and turn the power off to this unit so we're gonna go over there right now so we're back over here the reason why i got my electrical tester because there's a thing called like um lingering power reserve power or something like that so even though you turn the power off to the main thing the power can still be left in here like reserved so i'm going to test everything to make sure all the power is like discharged so we're good now it's safe for me to do this now again i'm gonna get this guy right here take it out i have a guy right here i should use i should use my screwdriver that thing be too strong remember guys i turned everything off so i'm not worried about getting electrocuted all right so put it behind there we'll put it right there and now we're gonna put this guy in this slot right here and then we're gonna tighten this okay i think that's it right there boom you gotta make sure it doesn't pull out i'll check everything else too okay so now we're good this one i'm just going to tighten back right here well i guess i can leave it loose so now we should be good right everything's tight it's a 20 amp make sure everything is secure in there i'm gonna go back and turn the power back on and then we'll turn the breaker on all right so now we could turn these on we're gonna turn these on here i heard a beep from the ac there's a green light on right there let's turn it on and there we go so once again guys what happened was this was originally a 120 volt i believe they bought a 240 volt ac the so the 120 volt is not gonna have enough power to power up the ac what happens that if you do that the only thing that's going to happen is that the the the display board will light up but no air will come out it doesn't have enough power so when they upgraded the breaker box they did put the neutral wire into another um breaker another 20 amp breaker but it was on the same leg you can't put on the same leg in order to get 240 volts because they'll cancel out so they put it on i had to put it on take from this leg and put on the right leg and when you do that and using neutral you have to mark it black and that's how we fix our problem that's why it's it's paranoia now so again i'm not electrician be sure to contact your certified licensed electrician to get like the technical terms and get the proper teaching this is just educational purposes only but once again if you guys if i did something wrong or i could do something better please let me know um in the comments you guys have been very helpful on my last video i did where i had um did something with the copper wire or the ground wire and i used the right wiring and you guys called me out on that thank you other than that guys i'll see you in the next video please subscribe see you next time

Channel: Ron Comes In Handy

Views: 46,335

Keywords: handyman, handy, man, contractor, vendor, plumber, electrician, beginner, thumbtack, angi, home, advisor, diy, breaker, box, receptacle, outlet, air, conditioner

Id: Mns6q2cQxlE

Length: 8min 29sec (509 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 13 2022