How to Splice Wires for Electricians

[Music] all right hey guys raleigh here from becoming electrician.com in this video i want to talk to you about how to splice your wires as an electrician okay now before you watch this video i highly recommend you watch the two other videos the one video is about how to strip your insulation jacket that is the outer white sheathing okay and then in the second video i talked to you about how to strip the conductor insulation okay a lot of people are very very aggressive when it comes to this and many times they score the wire copper is very brittle we want to make sure that we are protecting the integrity of the wire now in this video i want to talk to you about how to splice your wires right i want to talk about how to make it easy on you and some things for you to understand is when you're first getting started it's going to be very hard on your thumb okay because a lot of times you know like you are holding down and you have to strengthen your hand to be able to strip the wires but i want to talk about in order to make things easier many times stripping the wire a little bit longer is going to make your life easier one other thing i want to talk about is these wire nuts okay many times people think that one wire nut fits all and it's not the case okay i'll just show you on the back here so many times these brands that come up with a chart like this i highly suggest you read these you can pause the video and you can look at it for yourself now this brand is saying that this supports three number tens and i don't know about that i understand that they're saying it does but in my experience you essentially whenever you start working with number 10 wired you kind of wanted like the red mourette uh the yellow marette was very similar to like the blue marette uh but you know so essentially it's like you know maybe four or five number 14s under this thing like max and one other thing i'll say about moretz or sorry these are called wire nuts but moretz is usually what they call them on the job site it's kind of like a kleenex right that's just like the brand name but really it's like a tissue this is a wire nut but moret is usually what they call them and these are kind of like my favorite ones i like how it has the wings but in other words it's kind of one of those things that you know if you're trying to put the wire underneath the maret and it's not fitting you're going to need to go to the size up so i just want to say that one size does not fit all even though they are saying one size fits all all right so let's get into actually how to splice the wires because all this knowledge pertains to get a good end product now before we get into the video definitely check out my free book i have for apprentice electricians just go to becoming an electrician dot com forward slash subscribe and you can download my free electrical book for apprentices absolutely for free all right so a quick recap all right so what i'm going to do is i'm just going to cut off this wire here and i just want to show you how to strip the jacket quickly i'll show you how to strip the wire and then i'll show you how to splice it so that everyone could be on the same page all right so i also just released a video about my favorite knife as an electrician it's this 18 millimeter milwaukee snap knife you have to be very careful they're very very sharp and so like i was saying what i usually like to do is i put my my two fingers underneath i have my thumb up here and what you do is you gently score the wire like super super gently okay and so what this is going to do is because this exacto knife is so sharp it is this is allowing you to pull the wire up okay because it's all about the integrity of the wire now at the very very end what you want to do is you can put your knife in and yes you can score or you can actually cut through because down here the wire is going to get cut anyways and it's not a big deal okay so because i've scored the wire you can see how easy it is to pull up but because i was super super gentle i know that this wire so from down here this is bad right where my thumb is like this is going to get cut off up here this wire is good and then again i just take the knife and just gently all right so that is our cut all right so the next thing is when it comes to stripping our wires okay so the first thing i want to tell you guys is especially when you're first getting started as an electrician you need to build hand strength all right it comes over time and the hardest thing is when you start having to splice like multiple wires like so three wires isn't too bad and this is number 14 okay once you start getting into number 12 which is typically your your standard commercial wire right in a commercial setting all your plugs all your lights everything's number 12 and so it's a lot harder on your thumbs and on your fingers and when it comes to tucking your wires in the box all that stuff comes into more play because the wire is bigger it's a little harder to work with number 14 it is so flexible okay it's so easy like if you always work with number 12 and then you come and work on 14 like it's just much easier on your on your on your body on your hands but your hand strength is very important to build up over time but in order to help you when you're first getting started what i want to say is you can strip your wire a little bit longer okay if you strip it a little bit longer it's way easier to splice so when we look on our strippers we have solid we have stranded okay so solid is a solid single conductor like this right this is number 14. you have to make sure you put it in the 14 if you are putting it in the 16 or the 18 you're going to score the wire which i'll show you in just a second again there's also a stranded here as well so you can see this stranded is actually one up so a 14 is here you can see that we go down to 12 for solid it is actually the 14 for the stranded so watch this so i have this stripped and it was a good clean strip and if i go to bend this you're gonna see it's about eight or nine bends for this to break so one two three four five six seven eight okay so about eight bends which is you know like the because copper is it's a metal and it's soft and it will break and when it's in your box you wanna make sure that the copper is it's all about protecting the integrity of the wire right because again this is electricity there could be house fires all that kind of stuff okay now i quickly want to show you that if we strip this wire okay and so what happens is some people when they strip the wire they're really really rough on it they go you know they move their stripper all over the place and i've seen it all the time and i always try to um talk to apprentices and i try to explain to them i'm just like okay when you score the wire like this okay and let me just show you a little bit better when you score the wire and you have this what happens is the wire becomes very brittle because it's a metal okay it's copper and i just want to show you so i showed you when i bent it was about eight and if we're going to bend it like this so again we we can see that it's scored and so watch this how many bends do you think so one two two two bends compared to eight and so that's the first thing i really want to get across to you again you can go and check out the other video i have talking about how to strip your single conductors okay all right so when it comes to stripping your wire what i've found the biggest trick is you want to have your ends line up down here okay so watch this so so if we have our wires like this so typically what i like to do is i like to have one kind of cross over just like you see like this okay all the ends are lined up down here and when we take our pliers what i'm doing is i'm not grabbing up here at the top okay because if you grab at the top it's not going to work very good typically you come down here to the bottom and you're just kind of i'm going gently okay and i'm just kind of mo see how see how i'm kind of clamping it down like this with you know i'm kind of doing this as i'm going and i'm just kind of molding that wire because what you want to do is you want to get a nice braid going on that's the goal here we're getting a nice splice a nice braid okay and now i'm just kind of working it out and then once this once the braids kind of done then you go a little bit harder okay so like one two and you can come up here at the top now now it's like the braid okay and so like that's that's a pretty nice splice okay now when it comes to putting on your maret here's a cool trick i learned from somebody you gotta be really really careful okay because you can see that your your pliers have a hole in here and if you cut the length of that so for example you can see that if i come here and if i cut this you can see that it has the hole and the blades but if you do this the wrong way what's going to happen is you are going to actually cut off your wires right there it's happened to me sometimes you're talking to somebody and you think you think the pliers were this way but they're actually this way and you end up cutting off your whole splice and especially if the wires are already short you're like oh no so this is a cool little trick you can cut it right here i'll just cut that just to the side here and so that essentially is like the perfect and even after i cut maybe you might just kind of tighten this a little bit and then this is like the perfect size for that barrette you put it on and it's like boom okay and then again if this was a pigtail or whatever uh there you there you go you know you got like your two pigtails are i'll do one other splice for you guys here quickly before i wrap up the video with four wires okay all right just like i showed you in the last video you can strip your wires so i'm going to put it in the 14 and in the 12 and again i'm going to strip them a little bit longer and a cool little trick so imagine you are working in a finishing area and you have to come in and do like one plug or one switch or something and you want to you want to make sure that you're not leaving like you're you're you're stripping ends because if you leave these around it's just not good practice like in the roughing stage yeah you know all this stuff it goes on the ground and essentially you know it eventually gets cleaned up but if you go into a finishing stage like someone's home or there's carpet and stuff you don't want to leave the insulation end so what i found is if you strip you can put your your finger at the very end of it and you can catch it look look at that and then you would just throw it in the garbage rather than it go all over and then same even if you cut so if you're going to cut the copper because remember copper is a metal and if a little piece of copper goes on the countertop someone can go and you know they might put their tools or or they might put something on the counter and if it rubs on the on the copper it's going to scratch the countertop and they're going to look at you as the electrician so when you cut this again same thing it's sticking out just a little bit if you put your finger here and cut watch this you keep you catch it and then you make sure to throw that out okay so again it's all about just kind of knowing these little tricks so we have our wires and again when these are in a box it's a lot easier so the first thing i'm going to do is you just try to bunch them all and again it's kind of best practice to not touch the copper right because you always have to treat things as if they are live that's usually what we're always taught on the job site right like treat things as if they're live so when it's like this what i would do is if i'm holding them i'm using my clients just gently to push that insulation and the whole goal is to try to put just kind of line them all up okay and so once they're all pretty lined up and as you can see when they're longer look how easy it is and that's already pretty clean okay so again i haven't been electrician for the past year or two so i can even feel that my strength in my hand isn't as strong but again what i'm doing is i've lined up the ends and i'm just kind of molding them and again check out my hand i'm doing this you see over here kind of like that i'm kind of just gently molding them and what we're trying to do is we're just trying to get a braid okay sorry if the camera's not picking it up the best but we're just trying to get a nice braid going on and again i'm just taking my time for the video here but uh you can see that it's a pretty nice braid all around so far right the ends are lined up so what i would do is once that's once i'm happy with it so again because the wire can be in the box many times what i do is it's folded okay and so when it's folded when i'm twisting this way um it's it's going to be like hitting like my hand okay so in other words it's actually going to twist if the wire is straight and you twist it it's just going to keep twisting on you and it's annoying so if you bend it just a little bit again you don't want to always be bending the wire because it is copper but gentler bends like that isn't a big deal it's kind of like the harsh kinks so because we have it bent when i go to actually twist the wires you can see i get a nice tight splice that looks pretty good doesn't it right and so what i'm gonna do is i'm just gonna again you can you can do it this way like i'm showing to cut it but many times you know you can just eyeball it you'd be like yeah it's about there but this is a pretty cool little trick someone showed me you know so this right here is essentially the length of you know the wires that you can cut you can maybe go a little bit longer so you can see the copper is exposed a little bit and you cut but again i'm warning you always make sure you are cutting the right way because if you cut the wrong way you're cutting off your splice one time i've done it and the wires were already short and it was like no but there you go so that's a nice clean splice and i showed you you want to strip the wire a little bit longer you kind of butt up the ends make sure they're all good and when it comes to this so you can see the number 14 it is going on you can see that this wire here is not that covered so you can go a little bit more and i want to also share that you can't see look look you can see how it's going white i want it so that's good that it did that so if you tighten these down too much it is going to do this on you and again it's all about making sure that everything's safe so but anyway so in this case i would say that this is still acceptable even with that but there you go okay so let's take it off let's look at the splice so that was with four wires in this case the wire actually is a little bit long and that's because when i cut it i did go a little heavy so if i do this okay and then again when you cut it usually you want to kind of shave off those ends a little bit because if i share that with you you can see that these are very sharp and they're not going to twist too good into the wire nut okay because how the wire nut works is there's a there's the metal in there right and so that just helps the um the connection better right so for example if there was ever a loose splice in here because this is metal it's still going to help the connection even if this splice doesn't work some people you know they just put the two wires in and they just twist it together i always splice it always always always unless you're testing testing's a little bit different but so you have it i would maybe round i would round it out just a little bit and so what that's going to do is um sorry and then what that's going to do is you don't have those super super sharp edges anymore you know maybe i could have went a little bit more but let's just use another one because you know since this is youtube and a video and people are particular and i want to show kind of best practices so you can see that you know because i tightened it too much this does start to stretch right and compromises the integrity i guess of this thing technically so put that to the side and so this is a brand new one you can see it's nice and clean and let's just see here okay so that one fits a lot better and that's good all right so a nice clean splice so if you guys have any questions you feel free to leave comments below um but there you guys go that's how you splice wires as an electrician and uh don't forget about my free book if you want to stay updated with the website just come to becoming electrician dot com forward slash subscribe sign up with your name and email and i will email you my free book absolutely for free again leave comments below if you have questions or would like to see a video on different topics i have a bunch of different kind of equipment now that i want to show as we go along here i hope you are enjoying and make sure to subscribe here on youtube if you would like to be updated on new videos thanks so much for checking out the video i hope this is a good guideline video to show you how to splice make sure that you are protecting that copper that's the biggest thing i want to share with you guys the next thing is again you have to have that hand strength and you're going to get that over time but make your life easier and just strip the wire a little bit longer okay all right thanks for checking out the video talk to you in the next one

Channel: BecomingAnElectrician

Views: 71,996

Keywords: Apprentice Electrician, Electrician, Electricity, Splice Wires, Splicing Wires, Splicing, Splice, Joints, Wire Joints, Twist Wires, Marettes, Wire Nuts, Electrical Safety, Roughing-In, Cutting-In, Rough-In Stage, Construction, Electrical Wires, Wires, 3 Wire Splice, 4 Wire Splice, Multi-Wire Splice

Id: NKLHW1widCE

Length: 16min 35sec (995 seconds)

Published: Wed May 11 2022