How To Replace An Outlet | Ungrounded to Grounded

hi everyone welcome back to my channel my name is aaron with aaron fixes stuff today is going to be just a quick video on how to replace a receptacle uh i'm in a house that also in addition to replacing the receptacle also the old one is not grounded so i'm gonna add a ground to it and i'm gonna show how to do it in the video so just so you get an idea here's what the old receptacle looks like it's pretty old and painted over and ugly and in addition if you look at the lights over here you can tell that it has an open ground so there's no ground wire so there's two ways to add a ground i'm going to do the easier one today that's just going to be kind of like a little bonus piece if you have any questions when we're done comment below let's get started all right so obviously the first thing we're going to want to do is we're going to want to um disconnect power to the outlet so we're going to go to the panel and do that all right so we're good first i'm going to take the face plate off quick little tip sometimes over time uh people will paint and without taking the face plate off and you can have paint kind of stuck to the faceplate so always make sure that there isn't any anything caught on there uh no paint because if there is you're gonna risk uh kind of peeling the paint off the wall and then you're gonna have to paint and if you don't have the paint that's going to be more work than you want to so just make sure you're doing that all right now that we have that out there's going to be two screws this house is from the 70s they didn't have a ground wire in these you'll see in a minute so something nice and why we're lucky with this one is because the wiring was done with conduit and the boxes are metal so that means that basically the box itself is grounded which is uh pretty convenient for us so there's two ways to do it to add a ground wire one is it's called a grounding pigtail so it's just a pigtail that you can pick up you can buy a pack of them at home depot and then you'd attach it comes with a green screw it attaches to the box and on the other side you would just connect it like you would with any other wire this one what we're going to do is if you buy the preferred outlets this one right here what it has on the bottom of it is this little guy and that actually serves as a ground so you don't need that pigtail so once we connect um the wires and then close the ground screw once we put it all together when we test it we should be grounded and then strip it down with my wire strippers another thing you want to make sure of the screws that you aren't going to use make sure they're closed so in our case we're just going to connect to this one and that one and these are closed so that's good we're just going to screw the ground in so it doesn't stick out so there are several ways to do the wires so you can loop them around this the screw or in this case because it has that additional try to focus in on it the additional tab over here right over there we're just going to slide the wire in there and then tighten it up the same thing with the neutral wire so it can be trimmed down a little bit so all right so just a little tip if you are good if you do want to use if your outlet doesn't have that additional tab uh kind of like mine had and it's just one of these i do not recommend putting it in to the hole because what happens over time is it gets loose and actually the wire can come out just like that so i don't recommend sticking into the back of the outlet but instead making a loop so if you have one of these if you look at this hole over here right there if you put the wire in through it and put your finger on the back all you have to do is just do that and you create a nice loop there we go so that when you close it it closes in the same direction as the screw and what that does is when you tighten it the wire won't move if you do it the other way you're not going to get as a secure connection plus that's going to happen and you don't want that over there just keep in mind that you want it to close in the same direction or you want to loop it in the same direction as the screw but because we're doing it this way we don't have to worry about the loop we're tight and it's good to go next i'm going to wrap this all up if i was using the grounding pigtail i would just connect so basically it would kind of look like this with a screw on the end only longer i would connect the screw into the box and then i would connect the ground to this so it connects straight directly from the box to the ground screw the reason i do the the electrical tape is a my brother is an electrician a master electrician i should say and an electrical engineer um and when he taught me how to do this he always did it that way that way the wires have um they don't have anything to touch over here so it's just a quick step that'll keep it all nice and tight last step we're going to just screw this in and test it and now if it's working correctly this light and this light will both go on so they did and one last piece of advice i also prefer the preferred outlet covers because they don't break they're a little bit larger so this is the regular size versus that one so that way if the paint stopped you know at this line you don't have to worry about painting because it's a bigger plate all right that's all for today i hope you found this video to be educational or helpful if you did consider giving me a thumbs up or subscribing to my channel if you have any questions comments comment below let me know um if you would have done anything differently or if you have any questions about what i did or didn't do i appreciate your time and have a good day thank you

Channel: Aaron Fixes Stuff

Views: 414,284

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Id: bWRPJoCvY2g

Length: 9min 20sec (560 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 14 2020