How to Wire an Electrical Outlet

this is gonna be a quick video about basic outlet wiring and it's really intended for beginners so if you're a new homeowner and you've never done wiring before this is going to be useful to you all right this is a drawing of what an outlet looks like in North America it's got chrome screws on the one side brass on the other and a single green screw down the bottom and the wiring has three wires in it it's a black for hot white is neutral and the bare wire is known as ground now this first scenario we're going to take is called I call it the end of the run where a single wire comes into the box and your job is just to connect all three wires to the right place on the receptacle the green one is the ground that gets the bare copper wire the chrome screw gets the white wire and the brass screw gets the black wire now before we go any further let me show you some of the tools that I'm going to use here the first is a voltage tester to make sure that I have the circuit breaker turned off so I'm not going to get shocked then there's pliers wire stripper a flathead screwdriver a Philips screwdriver and of course the outlet and cover plate and the GoPro is optional now I know it turned off the circuit breaker before I got started here but I'm still going to verify that I turned the right one off using my voltage tester so that I have no voltage on any of the wires now I'm using the wire stripper to take off the right amount of insulation now I use the pliers to make a loop on the ground wire and put that on the screw the green screw and tighten that down now the black wire connects to the brass screw and the white wire connects to that silver screw and since I'm using the pushing connectors on this receptacle I'm going to put the screws in because they're unused and I don't want to stick it out and then I push the wires in tighten it down and put the cover plate on this is probably the easiest scenario you'll ever have to deal with the end of the run but now let's take a look at what happens if you're in the middle of the run and that's the scenario I have here behind this TV so here I've got two wires coming into the box the power comes in and out to feed the other outlet now these wires all get connected the same way but there's a little bit of a gotcha with the bare ground wires you can't connect to ground wires to the same screw it's just it's not allowed so you have to do something a little bit differently you're going to use a short piece of wire called a pigtail from that green screw and connect all three of them with a wire nut that's code then you connect two white wires to the chrome screws and the black wires to the brass screws and that's how you wire one in the middle of the run let's take a look so first things first very carefully I remove the wire nuts and I get my voltage tester to make sure double check that the power is off now I'm cutting off because I have enough wire here I'm cutting off the previous the twists because it's paying the neck to untwist them so it's much easier to just cut them if you can do it now instead of a wire nut I'm actually using one of these press end connectors this supports up to four wires but they're not removable so with ground wires they're okay but if you ever need to change it you have to cut it off and throw it away and then I've got that pigtail that's got the little bend on it and I put that on the green screw now my grounds are all connected next I'm gonna strip the wires again with my fancy wire stripper and I've seen this tool I saw it advertised on like Instagram or something and it was really pretty expensive and I found it much cheaper on Amazon I'll put the link into the video description below and now I'm just connecting the white wires both of them on the one side to the chrome screws and then the black wires get connected on the other side with the brass screws now I could have used the press end connectors but I decided not to do that I wanted to put them on the screws I generally like to put them on the screws because they're easier to remove and replace the outlet at some point leave any comments below with any questions you might have and thanks for watching hey there if you're new to the channel be sure to subscribe and hit that Bell icon to be the first to know when new videos are posted look for Handy TV on Facebook Twitter and Instagram and visit the website handy TV for more great ideas and information you

Channel: HandyDadTV

Views: 551,541

Rating: 4.8859386 out of 5

Keywords: handy dad tv, handydad.tv, handydadtv, how to, electrical outlet, electrical outlet wiring, electrical outlet installation, electrical receptacle wiring, how to wire an outlet, how to wire an outlet off another outlet, home wiring, electricity, leviton, wiring 110v outlet, home wiring 101, home wiring basics

Id: xex8cPv8CtA

Length: 5min 15sec (315 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 24 2018