How To Convert 120V Receptacles Or Branch Circuits To 240V! (Also 240V To 120V)

so you have a branch circuit with one 120 volt receptacle or a dedicated branch circuit for a small appliance water heater electric motor or pump that you no longer use and you'd like to convert it to a 240 volt receptacle or be able to direct wire a 240 volt load in this video you'll learn how simple the modification is you'll also see how to convert a 240 volt receptacle or branch circuit to 120 volts let's get started the receptacle you see here was used for a washing machine i had a washer and dryer in this room both of them have since been moved and i'd like to use this area especially to the left of this receptacle in the corner of this room to put a 220 volt air compressor so what i need to do in order to have the compressor connected up is switch this 120 volt receptacle to a 240 volt receptacle now the circuit that's connected to this right over here is a 20 amp circuit and the receptacle should be because it's a 20 amp breaker a 20 amp receptacle a 20 amp receptacle looks like what you see right over here and over the years i've seen many of these 15 amp receptacles used on a 20 amp line especially for washing machines i've never seen a problem with them being able to handle that current but you should always match up the receptacle to the branch circuits if you have a 15 amp line you want to use the type you see here if you have a 20 amp line then you want to use the one that has the extra blade in the center before you get started you need to make sure that there's only one thing connected to the branch circuit so you're going to plug something into the receptacle and you're going to have somebody go by the circuit breakers and turn them off one at a time until there's no more power at the receptacle you could plug in a lamp or you could use a bar meter tester like you see here a digital multimeter it makes no difference just check for voltage between the hot and the ground and the hot and the neutral when you see the voltage is no longer present you'll know the right circuit breaker has been found once you do find the right circuit breaker you need to go around to the other receptacles and also check out lights sometimes people tap into other circuits for lighting you do not want to have anything else connected to this circuit when you switch it to 240 make sure there's no lights that turned off when the circuit breaker turned off and make sure there's no other receptacles once you confirm it's just the one then we can go on to the next step i'm going to open this up and i'll show you what you have to do okay let me pull this out and turn it this way now if you take a look at the rear side of a 120 volt receptacle you're going to see the screws on this side are brass in color the black wire is your hot wire that has 120 volts on it that connects to the brass screw the white is neutral and you can see the screws on this side are silver and then you have a ground connection going from the ground screw on the receptacle to the metal box if you have a plastic box it's not going to be grounded but then it goes from the box through the conduit back to the breaker panel now the most common color for the neutral is going to be white but it can be gray and over here for the black wire the most common for the hot is black followed by red then blue then yellow so if you see red black blue or yellow you're going to know that's a hot wire and then you have the white and gray for the neutral so let me remove the wires from the receptacle and we're going to go on to the next step now if you look very closely right over here see that the wire going around the screw goes in a clockwise fashion from this side and around you want to make sure whenever you put a wire around the screw like this it's always the same direction when you go to tighten the screw it's going to close the loop allowing a very secure connection okay so this is it right here the receptacle is bolted onto this cover so i'd have to undo these bolts to pull the receptacle off let me show you the outlet that i'm going to be using right over here is a 20 amp 240 volt receptacle the cover that i'm going to be using is this one right here it's just going to have one right in the center if you're using a 20 amp circuit the gauge of these wires should be number 12. if you're using a 15 amp circuit then the gauge of these wires is going to be number 14. if you have a 15 amp circuit that you're going to be converting to 240 volts the receptacle is not going to look like this one here but it's going to look like the one you see right over here when the wires are exposed it's nice to have about six inches of wire sticking out and what i need to do now this wire here is going to end up a hot wire just like this one so what you need to do is you need to wrap this wire with black or red electric tape or you can do what i'm going to do i slide some heat shrink over the wire and then i have a nice red wire over the last three or four inches and that's going to be an indication that this is a hot wire so let me slide this over heat shrink it and we'll go on to the next step okay so this is good to go now it's identified as hot now if you have a metal box like you see here it's just two wires coming out with no ground wire and you can see that there's a metal conduit that's an indication that the metal box connected to the conduit is grounded so you're going to want to take a green ground screw like you see here and you're going to want to connect up a green wire just like this strip off a half of an inch of the end you're going to make a clockwise loop you're going to put it over the screw and you're going to secure it to the box now you'll have a ground from the box going to the receptacle if you had a 240 volt receptacle instead of a 120 volt receptacle or a 240 volt supply you would see two hot wires so they'd be both black black and blue black and red or yellows but they would be two hot wires in that case if you wanted to convert the 240 to 120 you would have to take one of those wires and make it a neutral wire and the way to do that is very simple you go to the circuit breaker and it would look like what you see right here a double pole so there's one breaker at the top one breaker at the bottom both are tied together with this common trip 120 volts goes in comes out over here in from the bus bar here and out and if you take the output or you measure the voltage between both of these screws or both of these openings you're going to have 240 volts so what you would do is you would turn the breaker off then you would unscrew and remove one of the hot wires once you do that you're going to push it off to the side turn the breaker back on and you're going to measure between the box which is grounded and each one of the hot wires one is still going to be on and the other one is going to be off the one that's off is going to become your neutral wire and you're going to take that black wire or whatever hot color it is and you're going to wrap it in white tape or slide over some white heat shrink and do exactly what i did for this wire the wire that was removed for the test you're going to slide white over that wire as well and you're going to connect this to the neutral bar which i'll show you momentarily when we go inside the panel the way this receptacle connects to this cover is using these two screws going into these two holes but these tabs over here stick out all right so it won't be able to go in unless you take a pair of pliers and just bend them back and forth until the metal fatigues and snaps off so you're going to be removing this ring that ring this one and that one i'll be doing that at the end after i connect the wires now what i want to do here is put a good loop on the end okay this one here is a little bigger actually so let me trim this down a little bit somebody got a little carried away with that all right so right here you can see the two loops and this one here is a little messy as well let's shrink this one down just a little bit when these hot wires are connected to the receptacle it makes no difference which one of the brass screws that you use now if you look right over here i'm going to help close this with the needle nose there we go and now i'm going to tighten that screw down make sure you pull on the wire to get the loop to go very close to the threads of the screw under the head perfect make sure everything is nice and tight if you do not want to have a receptacle but you'd rather have something wired directly to this box if you have a metal box like you see here just put a blank cover over the front there are many knockouts that you can pop out you can connect up some armored cable or even some liquid type and you can connect it from the box directly to what you want to power if the box is inside of a wall then you can put a blank cover with a hole in the center of the cover and you can come straight out of the cover using your liquid tight or your armored cable this is good to go now let me take you over to the electrical panel now i have a lot of experience working on panels so i'm going to be leaving the main breaker on when i do this but for you i highly recommend you turn the main breaker off if you don't have a main breaker then you're going to trace this panel back the piping from it towards your meter can and look for a main disconnect turn everything off before you remove this panel and this is what my panel looks like with the cover off you can see that there's no spaces available you're going to need a space in order to convert from 120 to 240 even though there's no space available there is a breaker that's not being used you can see right here there's no wire on it this is the washer one with the black wire and you need to trace this wire right here to see where it goes into which conduit and when i do that i can see there's a conduit at the very bottom and the white wire see it moving up and down right over there that white wire is the one that became a hot wire so i need to remove it from this screw right over here this bar is a neutral bar it's connected to the neutral wire which you can touch but i don't recommend you doing it and over here is your hot lug that's 120 volts that's another 120 volts and let me pop out the breaker because i want you to see the bus bars so i'm just going to go right over here and very gently just pop out the one that has nothing connected to it and i'm going to take this off because we're going to be switching the breaker from a single pole to a double pole the single pole is right here and this is the double you can see it has a common trip i'm just going to pop this off to the side here now you can have a better look you're going to see that this wire up here goes to a bus bar and it comes straight down and you can see right in there that connection so the breaker has to make contact with that connection right there to give you 120 volts between that point and this rail on the other side you can see there's another piece of metal connected to this breaker and that's connected to the other bus bar so in order to have 240 volts the breaker needs to have one pole on this side connected to that bus bar and you need to have the other side of the breaker or the other pole connected to this bus bar the two together will give you 240. if you do not have space in your panel you can always try and find what's called a space-saving breaker or a wafer breaker they fit in the space right here so this is a one-inch breaker they're designed to have both poles together and you can see what it looks like right over here it'll fit into that spot but what's very important if you take that breaker and you're trying to get 240 and you plug it into this position you're on the same bus bar so each one of these legs is going to be 120 you're not going to get 240 volts the breaker would have to be positioned between this terminal here and that terminal there and then you would end up with a half inch skinny breaker at the top and a half inch skinny breaker at the bottom each one of those will give you 120 but the one in the middle because it's touching both of those bus bars for each one of the poles is going to give you a 240 volt output so to make this work i picked up this breaker right over here and you can see it's a double pole 20. it's going to fit right into that space you can see the connections they're going to connect right in there so i'm going to leave this in the off position i'm going to pop it in and push it down okay i'm going to take this wire connect it to this screw pull on it make sure it's good so that's one connection ready to go now let me disconnect over here which is the white wire the neutral and as you can see because this panel has the main breaker in it there's no separate bar for the ground wires the neutral right here goes to that point it jumps across it comes down and you can see the green screw is the bonding screw between the neutral and the housing so all your ground wires and neutrals will be connected on these two rails if you had a sub panel you're supposed to have which many don't a separate ground bar you'll see a ground wire going to a separate bar and the bonding screw will not be connected it'll just be neutral and then you'll have the separate ground all your ground wires would go on the ground bar and all the neutrals would go on the neutral bar so i'm just going to grab this with needle nose you can now see the heat shrink has been applied to this white wire the neutral wire i'm going to pull it up and connect it to the screw right over here okay push this off to the side make it nice and that is it the neutral wire is now identified as hot connected to one pole and we have the original black wire on the other pole the ground is fine it's right over here connected to the neutral bar let's turn it on and go check the power to check the voltage i'll be using this bar meter keep an eye right over here it says ac 120 and 240. let's go between one leg and the ground first there you go 120 here in the box itself grounded good and now between both should give 240. and there you have it 240 volts if you have a 240 volt circuit that you want to convert to 120 then you would identify the neutral wire that you're going to be using as i said earlier by disconnecting this from the breaker turning the power on and identifying which one has no power you would take that wire the one that's neutral make it white with the heat shrink or white tape connect it to this neutral bar right over here then you would take this breaker out install a single pole like you see over here at the top connect it to the black wire turn it on and you'll have 120 volts going exactly where you had 240 volts this empty space here you could buy a plastic cover to go inside your panel if you enjoyed this video be sure to rate thumbs up share and check out my extensive video playlist for many other videos of interest to you thanks for watching

Channel: electronicsNmore

Views: 1,410,294

Keywords: How To Convert 120V Receptacles Or Branch Circuits To 240V, how to convert 120v receptacle to 240v, how to convert 240v receptacle to 120v, how to install circuit breaker, how to wire electrical panel, how to convert 110v to 220v outlet, how to convert 220v to, how to convert 220v to 110v outlet, convert 240v circuit to 120v, convert 120v circuit to 240v, DIY electrical repair, how to wire a branch circuit, breaker panel installation, electronicsnmore, insurance, lawyer, pharmaceutical

Id: crqYh5xtnoY

Length: 16min 36sec (996 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 20 2021