How to make custom extension cords for Christmas displays

hello everyone Victor Johnson with lighting up Paxton back on YouTube began with another how-to video this one is going to be about custom length extension cords and how the extreme Christmas decorator or professional Christmas decorator if you will makes their own custom length custom sized extension cords and even light strings like the screw base socket sets for c7 and c9 s how we make them custom length for our display or custom space sockets and things like that so this video is going to be a lot of fun about a lot of different tips and tricks on making extension cords and how everyone who makes those big elaborate Christmas displays goes about it so first of all first topic to discuss it's gonna be extension cord part of it so everyone has seen these in the store the big old 16 gauge or even 14 gauge extension cord some of them have the triple tap on the end of it some have just one female end and these are great for doing small Christmas displays or maybe running lights to one item somewhere in your yard that's kind of like a tree it's got a whole bunch of lights on it because these can take I believe some of these cords right up to 13 amps yeah 13 right here on the tag so very good cork he's grounded - so it's safe so no problems of the score the problem is that for the extreme Christmas decorators who have lots of different small items to run lights to and run different cords to all their different items this is nowhere near cost-effective - to utilize in our displays so what we're going to do we're gonna make our own custom length cords and the way that we do it is with lamp wire so this is lamp or otherwise called zip cord and it's just a two conductor wire so you can see right here there's just two wires on this cord whereas our big grounded cord right here has three is that three prongs right there on that plug so there's no ground on this cord but we really don't need a ground because all of our Christmas lights aren't going to have grounds on them so to us it's not going to be as essential and the nice thing about this lamp wire or zip cord is it's very easy to put plugs on anywhere you want whereas this cord if we cut this to try and short it down from this 20-footer that I'm stuck with a white ranch or this down intentionally I'm gonna have to buy a new socket and it's got screw terminals and it's nowhere near waterproof and it's gonna cause a bunch of problems and time to put something like this together so the nice thing about zip cord is is a lot easier a couple of things to address before we get to all the plugs and the different things I've got here on the workbench zip cord otherwise known as lamp wire is just like your common household extension cord wire essentially it comes in two different sizes there's SB t1 which I have here which you can see is a thinner gauge this is usually 18 gauge wire so it can only handle about 7 or 8 amps and then there's a thicker gauge 18 or sorry 16 gauge wire and a 16 gauge wire is usually going to be SB t2 which is your typical household extension cord so here's just your common indoor extension cord you can buy from any store you know with the plug and on the side here and you can see this is the same exact wire it's just that one is a little thicker than the other one now the SB t1 and SBT - just refers to how wide the overall thickness of the wire is including the insulation jacket on the outside it doesn't necessarily refer to what gages but usually you're gonna find out the SBT one's gonna be 18 gauge so you can handle seven or eight amps on this and then the SP t2 is going to be 16 gage so you I think mostly Sklar can be rated up to 10 amps so what the big Christmas decorators do is we'll buy this wire in bulk so I have a 500 foot spool here or what started out as a 500 foot spool and you can get these pools in both sizes SPT one or two now I choose to go with SB t1 because it's thinner gauge and I find I don't really need to have the extra two or three amp capacity on the wires anyway it's also a little bit cheaper than SPT - the plugs slide on a little bit easier and it also happens to match most of our socket wire which also happens to be SPT one so it it makes a lot of sense in my case to have SPT SPT one wire now you can get these spools from several good online commercial vendors I'll post them in the description you can also get them at the big-box stores your home depot Lowe's here in the Midwest I usually get some from Menards some of the online dealers will say that they have UV protective jacket on the outside which means they'll resist sunlight more than some others honestly if you're doing a seasonal Christmas display it's only gonna be out there one or two months out of the year it's not going to be too essential for it to have UV protection I'm sure it might last maybe longer in the long run but we're really you're talking at that point you know almost a decade in order before you even start seeing any kind of wear on these that's all going to be out there about a month at a time so here's a 500 foot spool here's a 250 foot spool that I bought my NARS you know that's been emptied already and then here's what was a thousand foot spool so you can get all kinds of different sizes the pricing on the 250 foot spool I found these at my again my local big-box lumberyard for about thirty four dollars for two hundred fifty feet worth for SBT one so you can see right here lamp cord 18 - so it's 18 gauge and so you know do the math for a thousand foot spool you're probably can be looking at maybe 120 bucks online and sometimes those vendors run sales different times of the year you might be able to get a thousand feet for for a total of a hundred bucks if you get a really good deal maybe so up in all those links in description some of meme advertising my videos sometimes so that's kind of neat so we have this lamp wire and it comes different colors too so they have green here I've also utilized black Brown you can even get white the nice thing about white say you have a white siding on your house and you want to say put some lights on a window or a wreath on top of your house you can actually run that white cord up the side of your house and it will disappear at nighttime because it'll blend with the siding so I tend use just the green Browns and blacks in my yard nice thing too is that you can mix different colors so say that all the green wires can run to one kind of color of lights all the brown wires for in a different color my I wish I would have started out doing that from the first place but it's a kind of neat trick you can do as well but anyway I find it this is really convenient way to do this so we have our zip cord here our lamp wire SB t1 or SP t - so here I just cut off a section so we have this wonderful spool of wire how the heck are we going to take this you know five foot of water and cutting in the links we need while here I just for example got a 1 foot length and they make what they call vampire plugs and these plugs are called vampire plugs so you can see here's your standard plug right here just the 2 prong plugs we only got 2 conductors here and if you look inside here if I get the camera angle right you can see there's little prongs there you go right there see little vampire teeth sticking out so those will make contact with the wire when we push this wire into the socket those prongs will pierce the insulation of the wire make contact so it will complete the circuit through the plug so these these plugs slide on very quickly and we'll do a quick tutorial here on how to utilize these so you can buy these plugs home depot has them online usually during the fall or winter months when all the Christmas decorators are putting stuff out otherwise you can get them online at all the good commercial online vendors that all I post in the description as well basically if you can get this stuff anywhere online you could usually get the plugs that go with it because they go hand-in-hand so these plugs if you look deep inside here so there's plug has two ends to it there is the end here where the wires going to come out of right here and then there's a solid end right here so we're gonna push this wire into the solid end and then bend it over and they make these really neat little backs that slide right on now if you look inside here though on the end where it slides into deep inside there if I get the line right you can barely make it out there's a little divider plastic divider in there the reason why the plastic divider is in there because when we put this wire into this plug we don't want any arcing across where we cut this wire here we don't want that to short out so what we're going to do is when we cut our wire to size like that for example then I'm gonna hold up the camera here I'm gonna take much my little bypass nippers and I'm going to cut about a quarter-inch right down the middle of the insulation jacket so I haven't actually cut the wire I just separated the two insulation jackets right there so that wire is still protecting there so what that that little plastic divider piece and our plug here is going to fit right into between those two wires to keep them set Braes so they can't short so the other thing before I stick this wire in here we need to check our polarity now if you've watched some of my other Christmas life videos you understand how important polarity is to knowing which way electricity is flowing through your wire and the reason why polarity is going to be important in our case is because anytime you plug something into this extension cord we're making you want to make sure that the hot which is the small prong or the hots always on the small prong is the side of the wire that's pushing the power because inside a light socket if we look inside here we see the center contact that little brass piece in the center of the bulb that is where the hot wires that's where electricity is going to be coming from it's going to be contact with the bottom of our bulb right here right here are this little gray piece on the bottom and on the side of the socket there's another brass contact and that's going to make contact with the screw portion of the bulb so the power is flowing in through the middle of the bulb and then out through the screw portion of the bulb and what's going to happen is if we have our polarity incorrect when we put screw our bulb on we could accidentally have our fingers touching the side of the bulb here when it makes contact with the side of the socket and if we have our ear on that side of the socket is hot which means it has power then we could shock ourselves which is why we always want to make sure the part of the socket that has the power coming to it is the bottom of the socket which is the hot now the neat thing is about all of these socket strings and also all of our zip cord are SP t1 and and to is that they all have a ribbed edge so if we feel this wire one side here is smooth if I feel this edge I feel a little rib on the side of it probably barely make it out on the camera if I hold it up yeah it's probably not gonna focus very well but there is a rib on one side so it's very easy feeling that rib side is always gonna be the neutral end which means the side that doesn't have the power coming from it no it's only completing the circuit same thing with our household extension cord grab one of these guys here you can probably see this better there is a rib right here on the left side yeah you can see that rib right there right there's where our rib is and you side here smooth so I'm going to take my cord I have here find the rib side which here is on the left I'm going to take our vampire socket and I'm going to find the wide prong which is the one right here on top and I'm going to look at that vampire tooth and see the white prongs and Peyer tooth is on the right so which means I want the neutral which is the rib side of the wire to be on the right as well so I'm actually going to flip this wire so here's my right cut I'm gonna flip this wire make sure that on the rib side on the right just like that so we're gonna do rib side of the wire onto the neutral larger prong of the plug we're gonna slide it right in there and you'll feel it slide into that little divider inside this plug and then we're gonna bend it over and we're going to push it on to those vampire teeth and you'll feel it slide right on and we're gonna take the back of our plug which slides on right here on the side of the plug just like this and these slide on plugs they have an open end and they have an end with a stop on it and the stop always goes over the end of the wire here so open in first I'm gonna slide it on just like that you can see there's our stuff now when I slide these on sometimes when you slide these plugs on the wire will move with it and when the wire moves moves with it it can bend those vampire prongs over so they won't make contacts your your cord will actually not have a complete circuit so in order to keep the wire from moving with it with the slide on back I hold the wire off down like this with my thumb and that keeps the wire from sliding as well so you don't bend over those vampire prongs and we push it over like that it's Arrigo there we have our male plug female plug on the other we're gonna do the same exact thing just as a review I'm going to nip about a quarter inch of the middle of the jacket here just like that to make sure I didn't accidentally cut the wire in the middle which I did not and here's our female plug same way we see the white prong in the in the small prong so the white prong always going to be the neutral so we take our white prong right here we're going to flip it over it's on the top here and we see that our neutral is going to be on the left so I'm going to grab my wire I'm gonna feel for the rib and make sure it's on the left so I'm feeling it and I feel the rib right here on the left so that's all meshed up so we have our our female in plug right here there's our neutral and so our neutral is going to be here on the left so I'm going to slide it right through here the back of the plug right here I'm going to slide it right in I'll feel it go over that divider you can feel it slide right in I'm gonna Bend it up push it on with my thumb and I'm going to take my back piece put it on and I'm gonna hold down with my thumb right here well I slide it on so the camera can see there you go just like that now these dark green plugs here that I've got from Home Depot it has this is the kind they have and also most of the online vendors I've come across the same plug these are really nice they're very easy to put it on with your hands they're not too difficult now some of the plugs here's the plug I have from another vendor and these plugs you can see there may have a little different plastic material and they're not they don't slide quite as easily which is a good and a bad thing the good thing being is that when you when you slide them on they won't ever come off because once in a while I'd run into one of these backs of these plugs getting caught on something and it might come off and sort of your plug will fall off but these definitely don't do that but the problem is this they're really difficult to slide on sometimes so the way that I I go about putting these on is with the channel lock pliers so I got my pair of channellocks I'll use a small one here's an example so when you put your cord in here and you say you want to slide your back on all you do is take your channel lock pliers to help you pull that back of the plug on just like that and again when you do that hold that wire down with your thumb real tight because you don't want that wire sliding with the back and pushing those vampire prongs over you want those vampire plug prongs to still stick up and pierce the insulation so there's a trick with that now the cool thing about making our custom length cords here so now here's the one foot cord example but what if I had a series of bushes all lined up in a row well I can run one cord to one of those bushes so long as I want them all on this all on on the same circuit and I can put on an inline plug so say you run once thin wire like this from one Bush to another to another and I just put an inline plug in the middle to do that we're just going to take one of our little female plugs here and we need to make it so the wire can pass the entire way through so we're gonna take our snippers here and if you snip right through sometimes you can run a crack all the way down that plug we don't want to break this plug and in fact if you look carefully in the camera here you can see there's a little bit of a scoring mark here where we can where it's already kind of partially scored to pop that out you can also use a file if you want to and file the plastic down so you have just enough room for that wire to come out right here but I found the easiest way to do is just take my little bypass nippers and instead of you know grabbing it and pulling straight down out and causing it to crack I'm just gonna kind of tear at it a little bit so again I'm not going very far just maybe like 3/16 of an inch and I'm gonna tear it hold down tight and I'm just gonna kind of bend it over and tear out it and see how we meet a little bit of a tear there that's perfect we didn't cause any cracking or anything like that so I'm going to take up my my cutters and I'm gonna go on the other end and same thing I'm gonna tear at it just like that so you can see what we've done now is we've create a little flap so we're almost there now we just got to cut that flap off so I'll take my cutters right there and then now I can clamp down and cut it right off just like that you can see now we have a will place for that wire to pass straight through the plug so again take my wire feel for the ribbed edge it's right here on the left so I'm going to take my female plug here again and I'm going to find my wider prong which is here on the bottom so now and we'll flip it now it's on the top and that prong is also on the left so we're perfect so I'm going to put this right on here now the factory hole which is right here on the top this is our factory hole that's the one that's going to get the stop so we're going to put it on from the factory side and again hold down this wire with my fingers so we don't want this wire slide if your slides very easily on inline plug especially I'm just gonna take my finger or push that back of the plug over oops slipped down my hand okay push it right over just like this there we go so we have our male end in line plug and then the other end now you can put as many inline plugs as you want on a wire like this just remember you can only have one male plug on a cord because if you plug this into an outlet you don't want another male and live over here because you can shock yourself you can do a male plug on the inline plug as well and have a female on one in a female on the other so a place where that may come in handy is a maybe if you have a an outlet right between two bushes and you want to run a cord from that outlet to each bush or something like that so there's a tip there for inline plugs okay so the next thing to address is how do we take what we learned here about making custom length cords and applying it to our custom length socket wire right here now this socket wire here is just a simple c9 string that I had bought at one of my stores locally you know one of the big-box stores and it's all again it's all SPT one wire the same stuff that I've got right here and you can also buy the socket wire from the commercial vendors again same place you can get the plugs in same place you can get the wire but the nice thing about this cord is that as you've watched me meet some of my previous videos this is a parallel circuit which means we can cut this cord anywhere between any bulb or after any bulb and put one of our little vampire plugs on to shortness to any custom Winkley one so I'm going to go ahead and grab a couple plugs here okay you have our male plug lever female plug now this c9 wire if you're biting the story is going to come with this fuse plug on it now again it this is very important as we talked about these sockets are polarized so we want to plug to be polarized and these do come with a polar ice plug if you open up this plug you'll notice there's two fuses in it now these are five amp fuses so the manufacturer is going to rake this is saying you can plug 2 into end which is right because they use one-and-a-half amps per 25 count string so we another thing these plugs are good for is we can cut this socket off and we can plug safely I would say four of these 25 count strings so I'll be a hundred total bulbs of c9 sockets so these plugs by the way they have two fuses in them if you notice the fuse on the left has no brass contacts the brass contacts are only the one on the right because on these plugs the only prong that's fused is the hot and the small one because that's where the power is coming from so that's where so if you ever blow a fuse in Wiley's all you do is pop that one out and this extra one here is just a spare so you move that one over to the where the brass contacts are you just have that empty space there there's a little tip on one of those but what I tend to do is I run in all incandescent display I can I want to connect you know for Lee's India not just to so I tend to cut off the first two plugs in any string of four I have so I can get it around work around that fuse that is something another disclaimer about using these plugs there is no fuse on them so it's very important to keep track of your amperage 25 counts 9 string as I says you can use 1.5 amps per string your typical mini light string is going to use a third of an amp per string and the way to keep track of all that is I have my little handy dandy kilowatt meter you get these from Lowe's Home Depot from places like that that only 10 or 15 bucks and they can tell you exactly how many amps something is using whatever you end up plugging into it so it's a very handy thing so remember remember our impasse cities SPT want we're gonna be limited to seven or eight and SPT - are we limited to about 10 now if you have a long run this wire is thin enough where you can't really have a long run over 50 feet of anything you know if you do start getting long runs from your outlet to whatever displayed out and you want to use you have to start thinking about okay that wires we have a lot of voltage drop you won't be able to run seven amps through it you may only be able to run four or five because you don't want your wired overheat so keep that in mind so here's our socket string again same thing we can cut this wire anywhere and because it's the same wire we can put in our snap-on plugs it's very briefly we've done it before already I'm going to feel for the ribbed wire which is on the left I'm going to cut the wire right here quarter inch down take my male plug here and I'm going to line up my white prong which is on the right I'm gonna make sure I have my neutral which is the rib on the right I'm gonna turn it over slide it into the plug if you let go over that divider that's inside here bend it over and put on the back of my plug perfect just like that so that's how we can make custom length course so if you could run one of these c9 cords these are really nice for running up the the eaves of your roof and say at the peak of your roof you have one eave meeting another well instead of having to run a separate cord all the way up to it we can now stick our female inline plug right here say this is the the peak of our our our gable of our house we can put a female plug here and run another string perpendicular so we have a place where three strings all meet in one spot so that's a neat trick that you can do with with the socket wire which is why I like working with this kind of socket water so the other thing the last thing we can do with this kind of wire is not only do we do we have these vampire plugs we have vampire sockets that I have right here so here's the c9 socket just like we have on our home bought string right here same exact inside just occipital c9 socket only we're someone we're actually gonna be able to snap onto the wire like our vampire plugs so again we check our polarity we want the middle to be the hot and the side to be the neutral so if we flip this over we can see our vampire prongs this one's the neutral and here's the in the middle so we look it up in the camera here so on the left is on the side that's our Neutral so we're gonna rig wire to be on the left so I'll take my wire right here I'm going to feel for the rib which is on the right right now so I'm gonna flip it over and then we're just going to push this socket right on to that wire and you'll see that wire will nest right into the back of that socket just like that so you got nested right in there and then some sockets are different to people that manufacture you buy these from again same place you can buy all these plugs from here's the little back that snaps right in and so this one is really nice because I could snap it in so the clip is on this side or I can flip it around so the clip is on this side some of them you can't necessarily do that but they're all they all work pretty well so I'm just going to slide this in just like that now these are very difficult to push on just by hand so again I'm going to go to my channel lock pliers here and when very carefully push it right on to the socket just like this I'm gonna very carefully I don't want to damage the edge of the socket here too much I'm just gonna carefully clamp down you'll see that back end close and what that's doing is that's pushing that wire onto those vampire prongs and the clip is gonna lock it into place then I close it up there I'm going to go ahead and flip it over I'll give it one more go on this end just like that there we have our c9 socket so the cool thing about having your own c---nine sockets is that you can make any custom spacing so say I had a long driveway one align well I can put one of these every four or five feet or even one every ten feet then since I've got a huge spool of wire like this I can make a really long string of Lights to go down like a long lane or something like that but because I'm only using a socket every five or ten feet it's not using that much power so I can get away with doing something like that especially if you use an LED retrofit bulb that you can screw in so those are all the tips I've got for making custom length extension cords and custom length c9 strands or even see some you get these same sockets and c7 size which is lightly smaller size bulb so if you have any any comments or questions leave them down in the bottom of the video there and I'll try and get to answering as many as I can so thank you for watching and subscribing and hopefully I'll be back with another video shortly if you got any tips leave them in the comments of something else you want to learn next time thank you

Channel: Lighting Up Paxton

Views: 255,972

Keywords: How to, Christmas, Lights, LightingUpPaxton, extension, custom, synchronized, display, zip wire, lamp cord, spt 1, spt 2, socket, wire, plug, fuse, cord, LED, retrofit, bulb, Paxton, Victor Johnson

Id: o81kf2VvbO4

Length: 26min 42sec (1602 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 30 2017