How To Rough In a Switch Box Feeding Lights & Outlets

hey guys thanks for stopping by today we're going to be going through the process of wiring up this electrical box right beside me here what we've got going on is we need a light switch a single pole light switch to control a few lights that are connected to it and then we are also going to be passing power through to some receptacles or outlets that will not be on that switch so it should be an interesting box to do up and it's actually a very common thing to encounter this type of scenario so we're going to go through the detailed process and i'm going to show you how to roll each set of wires back into the box including the grounds the neutrals and the hots as well as how to do any pigtails that may be needed at the switch whenever i'm working on circuits like this especially if you're new to doing electrical work it's nice just to kind of write on the wires so you know what's going on and you can keep things straight so i've got my crawl space lights marked out over there those are going to be the switch to lights and then i have my receptacles that are also marked going out that direction so i can keep these straight inside of the box now right here this is actually going to be the home run this goes all the way back to the main panel and this is a 20 amp circuit that's going to be on a dual function breaker so it's both a gfci and an afci breaker powering this particular circuit that doesn't really matter for what we're doing today but now you know now obviously i already have my cables pulled into the box here and i have them to about the right length coming out what i like to see typically is about six inches past the face of the box and usually the handles of your wire strippers end up being close to six inches and so you can kind of use that as a general guide to get these to be about the right length but i usually don't trim them down until i actually strip the cables so we'll go ahead and strip the cables first and then we will come back and trim off any excess now some guys will strip the sheathing off of the wires before they pull them into the box and that probably is easier but for me it's so far just been more convenient to pull the cables in all together and then strip it back later the way i strip the sheathing off of the cables is just using a standard utility knife and scoring down the center of the cable assembly where the bare copper wire is located being careful not to cut myself as i do so they do make tools for this and i'll link to the different tools in the description that are options for different stripping tools that you can try to use but for me a utility knife seems to work great now code requires that you have at least a quarter inch of insulation showing inside of the box so what i typically like to do is take it back to about a half inch or so somewhere between a quarter and a half seems to be about the right amount then i just pull on the sheathing and then i use my utility knife to just cut that excess off just like so it's not the most glorious process but it gets the job done so now i'll just repeat that same process with the remaining two cables once you get all the sheathing removed just take a minute and inspect to make sure that you didn't damage any of the insulation on the actual conductors before proceeding to the next step once i get all the sheathing stripped back what i'll typically do then is kind of center out the wires and then trim them all off at approximately six inches using my wire stripper as a guide for doing so now as always the first conductors you're going to deal with are the ground conductors so let's take our hot and neutral conductors and get those out of the way by bending them towards the outside of the box your ground conductors or your ground wires are the one thing you really don't have to worry about as far as which wires are going where now with these ground wires we'll also be creating a pigtail for the light switch because there is a ground connection on it that we need to connect to these ground wires so to create this pigtail we're just going to be using a scrap piece of 12 gauge bare copper wire now you could also use insulated 12 gauge wire which is a better idea so if you have some green insulated 12 gauge wire to connect for your pigtail that is a better option but the bare copper works just fine most of the time i use these yellow wire connectors which are good for up to three 12 gauge wires but since we're going to be connecting four of them we are going to have to use the next size up the ones that i have here are these i'll link to these in the description but these particular ones go up to five 12 gauge conductors in one connector one thing i wanted to point out on the instructions is that pre-twisting is unnecessary it doesn't say that we can't pre-twist but it's not required so we'll take our conductors and bend them off to the right-hand side that gives us some leverage for when we actually have to connect our cables and then i also have my pigtail here in my left hand so we've got them all held in place get the ends to line up as close as possible make sure that one of them isn't further out or further in than the others sometimes it works well to align the ends of the wires just by using your stripper and kind of pushing it on the face of them like that so you get them all to the same point one of the benefits of pre-twisting is that does help you to keep them all lined up when you actually put your connector on so i'm just going to use my little needle nose here and give these a little bit of a pre-twist not a whole lot just enough that they're going to kind of stay together and then we'll trim off the excess so they're all lined up correctly so now what we'll do is we'll just trim them off back to the shortest conductor like that and now we'll go ahead and put our wire connector on and we should be able to just pretty much get this finger tight if you want to use a pliers or something on the actual wire nut you can do that if they have these little wings on them though typically in my opinion it's not really necessary because you can get pretty good leverage on it and you can even like start to rotate the wires going back this direction don't continue twisting this back into the box in my opinion you should just twist it a little bit past the actual wire nut if you want to with the grounds especially it's fine to do that a little bit more but the more you twist these conductors it actually damages the copper and makes it stiffer so that if you ever had to take it apart and change something it would be more difficult to do so the further back you twist it some guys you'll see where the cable was twisted all the way back like almost to the back of the box and that's just not good practice so now we can take and rotate these wires into the back of the box and this is one of the more tricky parts sort of it's not that big of a deal but if you kind of have some strategy to it instead of just randomly cramming them back in it'll make your entire uh rest of your wiring project a lot easier so we've got all of our ground conductors neatly tucked into the back of the box and then we have our pigtail extending from the bottom left hand corner here and you're just going to want to gather all the pigtails that you're dealing with in one location in this case we're actually not going to be making very many but what i typically do then is just leave this pigtail connected until i have all the pigtails that i'm going to be dealing with and then i'll clip them off all at the same time so now that all of our ground wires have been neatly rolled into the back of the box we can move on to our neutrals the neutrals are what you're always going to work on second now in this case all the neutrals are going to be tied together because like we talked about before one of these is going out to some lights and one is going out to some receptacles and the neutrals are not interrupted they're always connected together because it's the return path for the current on both those receptacles and the lights now the one thing that we're going to do in addition to just connecting these three is we're going to add a neutral pigtail the reason for that is that if we were to ever want to put in a smart switch which we're not doing that today we're just using a standard one but if we were going to put in a smart switch or a wi-fi switch those do require neutrals so i like to always add my pigtail even though i'm not going to use it right now we'll just go ahead and have it available so that in the future if we decide to put a wi-fi switch or something in here it will be available now the length that we're going to be stripping off of these conductors i thought i had it better in there than i did so we're going to strip 9 16 of insulation off each one of these conductors to get them ready to connect to each other and this time we'll follow the instructions and not pre-twist them just for fun see how that goes with four conductors like this it definitely gets a hold of them really well each one of them has equal contact if you have five wires uh in here it seems like it's a little bit more difficult to get them all to equally contact the wire nut and with that it seems like it's a little bit nicer to go ahead and just pre-twist them just to be safe so now we'll roll these into the back of the box again and then we'll roll our pigtail over to be at the same location as our ground wire our grounding pigtail so we've got our grounding pigtail as well as a neutral pigtail should we ever want to install a smart switch so for this particular box and most boxes really the hot wires are going to be the ones that you need to pay attention to which ones are going where because obviously the neutrals were all tied together the grounds were all tied together and that's pretty typical now the neutrals aren't always tied together depending on the situation sometimes they are separated especially if you have more than one circuit going through a box you do not tie all of the neutrals together but you do always tie all of the rounding conductors together like we did in the back of this box so what we have here is our home run on this side and you can label these wires if you want use a label maker or something if you want to be able to keep track of it with this simple of a box in my opinion it's really not necessary so like i said this is the home run so this is the power coming into the box then we have this wire right here that's going to our lights and then this wire right here is going to our receptacles so we want power to go through to our our receptacles all the time so we're going to have to create a pigtail for powering our light switch which will then power our cable or conductor going out to our actual lights so we're going to take these two and then create one more hot pigtail coming off of those so that we effectively are passing our power from our home run through to our receptacles all the time so again we'll just strip 9 16 off of each one of our conductors that we're going to be connecting into our pigtail assembly now technically i could get away with using a yellow wire connector for this or a wire nut but i'm just going to go ahead and use these red ones these work fine for this combination of conductors as well and since i already have them handy that's what we're going to use the only benefit to going with a smaller connector would be that it theoretically saves you a little bit of space in your [Applause] box and now we'll bring our pigtail around which is going to be the power supplying our switch for the lights okay so now that we have all of our pigtails gathered into one spot i'll actually clip them all off and i'll just use the handle of my wire stripper as the indicator for how long to clip those off at because it's handy it's about six inches and so to summarize the purpose of each of these this is our power that's going to be feeding our switch and then this is our grounding conductor it's going to connect to the body of the switch the neutral we're not going to use right now but it's available so if you did want to power some kind of a motion switch or a wi-fi switch you could do so and then this wire right here is the power going out to our lights one more thing about the neutral in the 2020 national electrical code they do require that you have a neutral present at every switch location now it doesn't say that you have to put in a neutral pigtail like we did that's kind of an extra step but you do need to have a neutral at the box which effectively changes how you can set up three-way switches and some other things but just keep that in mind now you do need to save off your neutral because it is a current carrying conductor so you don't want this to just be bare on the end so we'll just now roll this into the back of the box so that it's available if needed but you can see that it's really convenient to have that neutral already done up because to pull all of these conductors out of the back of the box is a major hassle if you wanted to add a neutral pigtail at a later time we're just using a standard snap switch which is probably the most common thing you're going to encounter this zone does have the option of using backstab connections which use these little spring-loaded clips that retain the conductor once you push it in there and my recommendation is to not use those and just wrap the conductor around the screw itself which is what we're going to do here in just a second but there is a variety of opinions so you can comment down below and let me know if you use backstab connections routinely or if you think they're going to immediately burn your house down if you have a switch that has like a clamp style connection that uses the screw to tighten down onto the conductor so you can slide the conductor in and then tighten the screw down and it clamps it i think that's perfectly fine but if you have just the back stab connection or the option of wrapping it around the screw i'd always choose to wrap it around the screw so when i strip these connectors back you usually need about three quarters of an inch for wrapping it around the screw so we'll do that now we're going to pay attention to which way we're going to be putting the switch in we want it to be such that when it's in here this is on this is off and the reason we're paying attention to that is it shows us which side the connections are going to be made so they're going to be here on the right hand side as we're kind of looking at this and so we're going to bend our hooks on our wires such that as you tighten the screw it will also tighten the connection onto the switch and our ground is on the other side so we're going to bend that hook the other way now it technically doesn't matter which terminal goes to which wire so i'm not even going to bother with paying attention to that but if you wanted to develop some kind of a standard practice like if you always had the power coming on the bottom or the top you can do that but functionally it's not going to change anything for the way it works you can see as i tighten it there it kind of pulls the the hook tighter and if you were to put it around the other way it would loosen it so that's why you want to bend them in the same direction now some people will take electrical tape and wrap it around the outside of the switch just to cover these terminals here so they don't short out against anything now in my opinion it's not really necessary most of the time if this was a metal box i probably would go ahead and do it just since you have a higher likelihood of it hitting up against the side of the box and causing a problem but with a standard plastic box like this and if you're planning to put the cover on right away which you should be then i really don't think it's necessary but if you want to it doesn't really harm anything you can certainly wrap it with electrical tape comment down below if you have an opinion about whether or not you think it's a good idea to wrap all of your switches or receptacles with electrical tape before installing them all right so we'll get this thing in position and typically you can kind of just fold the wires one time like this and push it up into place and it's best to push it all the way up to where it's seated before you use the screws you don't want to use the screws to push the receptacle into position so make sure that it's in the right orientation so right now this is how i wanted it to be so we'd be flipping it on this direction and off this way now in order to keep the switch level or parallel to wherever you have it installed typically what i'll do is i'll just pull it all the way over to one side of these openings here and that'll just keep it parallel with the side of the box or you can level it back and forth a little bit if needed but if you're just gonna want to keep it parallel with the box itself and i just pull it over to one side that keeps it nice and easy for your installation so there we have the installation completed of the switch itself let's go ahead and put our cover plate in place so once we have our power connected we will go ahead and test this to make sure everything is working properly i'll let you know if there were any issues but there really shouldn't be the home run is not connected into the main panel yet and that's how you should always do your electrical projects finish all of your wiring first and the very last thing you'll do is connect your actual home run into the panel that way you have absolutely no chance of the circuit accidentally being energized while you're working on it so if you guys want to see how to tie your home run into a main panel that's going to be a video coming up soon and i'll likely have it done by the time you you're watching this video so i'll put that link here on the screen so you can click on that right here otherwise this video right down here is the one that youtube thinks you'd like to watch if you have any other thoughts or suggestions make sure you put those in the comment section below and subscribe if you want to see more videos like this one alright we'll see you over there in just a few seconds

Channel: Benjamin Sahlstrom

Views: 526,647

Keywords: Rough In Wiring, Ground, Neutral, Hot, Electrical, How To

Id: VuPHkKYtGqA

Length: 18min 50sec (1130 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 26 2021