How To Wire Multiple Receptacles

hi i'm shannon from houseimprovements.com and today i want to just show you in this video how to wire multiple receptacles we previously had a video already for this but this is basically an updated version based on a lot of the questions that we're receiving so we're throwing a little more detail into this one including pigtailing at some of the junctions so so to start out with the situation we have here and this may not be 100 the same as what you have we're dealing with a 20 amp kitchen circuit here so that's why the wires that we're looking at are yellow they're indicating that it's a 20 amp they're also 12 2 wires they're a little heavier gauge so we're at an island wall here and what we've got is this one yellow uh wire coming in is the feed line coming right from the panel i've just put some black tape on it just to indicate that so it's easier to follow so it's coming up through the floor and it's drilled through the through the stud work the holes are about three-quarters of an inch and they're centered in the frame so that if anybody's nailing or screwing out here there's less chance of puncturing the actual wiring that's in the wall so you can see they're all basically drilled right into the center of the stud and relatively relatively fairly level uh that isn't really necessary but it just looks neater so anyways we've got our feed coming in we're coming over here to this end of the wall to our first double gang box so we've got a a double gang metal box here it's been fastened to the stud this particular one uh you can't really see them but there's screws there's a flange top and bottom and there's a four series of four screws in there holding the box to the wall in this particular box we're actually going to have a switch over on this one side we aren't dealing with that today but on this side we are going to have a counter plug which will be a 20 amp plug and this is the first plug-in in this series so once we pigtail at this junction this other wire here is carrying electricity back out of this box back down i should just mention you probably notice this extra loop of wire here our staples within 12 inches of our box by code we're actually about six seven inches then i've got a loop a little extra loop of wire and then it goes into the box and is snugged up in the clamp here the reason for this extra loop here not everybody does that i like to do it so that if down the road one of these wires ever breaks off or shorts off or something you could actually loosen the clamp in the box and pull some more wire up in in there so i don't know what i've got there i've got about an excess of probably another six inches or so so that's that's what the loops for so going back to the to tracing the wires we have the power the supply coming in which is this set it'll be pigtailed to this one which is the supply for the next plug-in down the road down the wall so that wire comes out and again just follows along here it's the second yellow wire comes right over here now because this is a kitchen counter we can't it isn't powering up this plug so we're skipping right past it it's on its own circuit and we're continuing right through over to the next plugin over here okay now uh same same idea and you probably can't see it because they angle the camera we've got a staple about in this position i've got a loop of excess wire coming down and the wiring is into the box in this particular situation this is the the last plug on this circuit so there's only two plugs um if if we had more you know if this was in your wall of your house in the bedroom or whatever and maybe you've got four or five plugins all on the same line there'd simply just be another another wire coming out of here and it would just continue on to the next one and next the next to the next and the way it goes okay so we're gonna go back to the very first box we'll reset the camera up so you can see a little bit better and i'll show actual doing actually doing the pigtail hooking it to the receptacle we'll deal with the ground wire and anything else i've forgotten to tell you okay so we're at our first box so this is the one at the beginning of the circuit and so we've got our power supply coming in and we have this other line heading to the next set of receptacles down the line or it could be a switch or anything so okay so we've got those first thing i like to do just kind of get the uh the hot and the neutral wire down out of the way so that i can hook up the ground wire very important that the ground is not only attached to the metal box as well as to the receptacle itself so first thing i do is i pick one of the ground wires and i'll loop it around the ground screw right in the back of the box that's this screw right here i think you can see there how i looped right around and i'm going to tighten that screw up so i want to snug it up good and tight there like that so the end this is the still the same wire those that wire and this one i want to hook together as well as a pigtail so the pigtail you'll you'll see as i go along here basically the pigtail is once i've hooked these together the end of the pigtail is the one that actually goes to the receptacle so if anything ever ever happened with the it's not too hot off and it's going to happen with the ground but if this wire ever burnt off this receptacle all your other receptacles would still be grounded um so i'm also going to just shorten up these wires because they don't need to be that long those ones once they're merited together and pigtailed they're going to be tucked back in the box so so i've got my uh my three wires just kind of bunched together there all sticking out this way i'm just going to twist them with my pliers and for the ground ones you can get a real nice long twist on them and i'm just going to trim off these jagged ends now a lot of guys won't worry about putting a wire nut or uh sometimes people call this just a moret which is actually the brand name of this type but uh wire nut on the end some people won't do that on the ground but i generally will just to be sure and i'm just tightening up this other ground screw just to get it out of the way a little bit more that we the one that we didn't use so now i just take and gently bend those ground wires back into the box so they're basically just kind of tucked back out of the way now that pigtail one that i added on was probably about six inches long so uh i just need enough so it'll get out of the box here to hook on to the receptacle i'm going to give it a little bit of a little bit of a hook right now while i'm thinking of it because that will hook onto the screw of the receptacle okay so now we can deal with these other sets of wires the whites and the blacks and again in this case we're going to pair them up black to black white to white so since i've got the black ones up top i'll deal with them first so i'm basically going to pigtail them together just like really what i did with the ground screw i'm going to shorten them up i've got a strip because they have the outer sheathing on them i've got to strip some of that off to get down to the the bare copper and this is a little heavier wire than you might see if you aren't working in the kitchen typically you'd see 14 2 where this is 12 too just a little heavier gauge because it's a 20 amp circuit but so again i'm just kind of squeezing these three together the 12 gauge is a little more difficult to get going but i'll use the pliers pinch it together and start twisting them so that they wrap and intertwine together okay just like that so you can see how they're twisted together there again i'm just going to neaten them up a little bit shorten them up i usually when i'm doing this type of connection with a with a wire nut uh pigtail i so i would strip more copper off than i normally would where i'm just wrapping it around a screw and that's just so that once you've got it twisted together you know there's kind of enough there to get them all twisted together again wire nut on there turn that on real nice that just kind of threads right on there until you're getting quite a bit of uh restriction then you know it's tight and i want to again just kind of gently fold these back neatly out of the way into the box into the back of the box and again that 12 gauge wire just takes a little bit more effort to get back there okay and this is the end of our pigtail that we added to it i'm going to strip that one off right now around three quarters of an inch or so is how much you want to strip off i'm gonna give that a little curl so that it's ready for the screw you notice on this one when i put this on these on the receptacle most times you're going to see the receptacle mounted this way with the ground pronged down we've had quite a few comments actually on uh people suggesting that we should mount them this way which you don't see very common and they they do have a good argument for it their argument is if you've got a plug-in plugged in this way which is more common and your your two hot prongs are basically at the top if the plug-in slightly falls out like sometimes they do when they get loose and something metal ever fell in there it's easier to short out if the plug-ins like this and the prong falls out a bit it actually would contact the ground more than likely before it would contact a hot wire which should not uh spark or arc so they do have a good point most people just really don't put it that way i don't know that it's actually code to do that or at least it isn't here so uh i still kind of stick with this this direction just because that's what people mostly like to see so anyways getting back to my point on the wire hook there when i attach the wires to this the white the black wire or red whichever is your hot would go to the brass screws okay so black to brass on this side the white wires would go to the silver screws okay and they're always when you've got the ground pronged down that's which way it would be orientated so i've already bent the wire the hook up on the black wire because when i hook that on the screw and go to tighten the screw i'm turning the screw clockwise which is forcing if anything that wire to wrap around there even tighter if it was uh i'll just turn this over hope i can get it off of there now if i had it wrapped the wrong way and i'm turning it clockwise but the wire was going around here i'm actually almost it's forcing the wire to try to unwrap off of there so that's why it's important to wrap the wire the right way around the screw so whichever way it's tightening up you want it as if it would be pulling it around that screw okay so that's our pigtail lead for the hots we're gonna do the same thing here on the white on the neutral and shorten them up strip some off get my pigtail which i've already got stripped get these uh all nice and close so you can see i'm just kind of giving that a little bit of a bend just to make it easier to get here and get started let's get them twisted get them started just like so okay you can kind of see even the uh the back side of the wire that has the uh shielding on it still wants to kind of twist together and that's fine there's nothing that's not hurting anything it's probably helping i'm going to trim these up so the wire nut will fit nicely put the wire nut on and then i can get these white wires back out of the way those 12 gauge wires are just a little stiffer to deal with there so i've got that all back out of the way i just got to strip this neutral wire and this one the hook's going down so we're on the other side of the receptacle like so i just had to get a different screwdriver okay so what we're left here down is uh with the feed to this one receptacle and the re the reason people are suggesting or saying that they should pigtail it like this again like i said before if if i just had the hot wire coming in here and the feed wire to the next plug-in coming off this top screw and something ever went wrong with this switch it actually knocks out all the plug-ins after this one or it could by doing the pigtail there's always going to be even if this plug-in messes up all the other plug-ins down the line should still work so so i'm just going to go ahead now because we've only got the we only need two of the screws i'm going to turn in the two screws we don't need and it doesn't matter which one you pick just want to screw them in so they're not sticking out where they could possibly contact the box or something because we and we don't need them anyways the ground screw is down here on the corner um and you probably noticed this plug-in looks a little different because it is a 20 amp circuit it's got this uh funny t looking slot on the one plug and that's just indicating that it is a 20 amp so not really any difference as far as how you wire it up what else can i tell you oh on the back on this one doesn't even have it on on most uh 10 amp or 15 amp type plugins you might have some holes here on the back where you could actually slide in wires as well instead of wrapping around the screw they work but i really suggest you don't use them you're better off if you've got multiple wires to do a pigtail in the back of the box as opposed to using those things there so so anyways we've got that all uh talked about talk to death so i think we're good with that so now it just comes down to mounting the uh the wiring onto the plug-in so again black to brass hooked it around the screw tighten that screw up snug it up really good like so white to silver again i've got it twisted around there the right direction snugged up now my ground could have been slightly longer it's going to be a little trickier to get hooked up so i'm going to have to start folding these these pigtailed wires back in there a little bit already so that i can get around to my ground and you're probably not going to be able to see it but there's a screw down on the corner a lot of times it'll actually be marked as and colored green and it'll always be a single screw so if you're in doubt have a look you're going to see that you've got paired up screws on the two sides and somewhere down near the bottom possibly even the top you're going to have a single screw all by it kind of by itself that's your ground screw okay so i've got that all snugged on there something else i like to do just as a precautionary thing is i put a wrap of tape around the receptacle now that uh now that we've got all the wiring on so i go around and i'll just show you here once i've got it on i usually go around twice in order to get it all covered and what i'm doing is just covering up the screws and the contacts on the side you can see now that you can't see any of them where this is what it looked like before so i've covered up all of this here so that if somebody was in here messing around or the receptacle came a bit loose it couldn't contact the side of the metal box and short out so or if you've got you know maybe you're doing some renovations and you've got the plug just hanging out of the wall like this it's a lot more safe this way because you know if somebody walks up and grabs the plug to plug in a cord there's less chance they're going to shock themselves or you know maybe mistakenly touch it with something metal so so anyways i've got that taped up i would just uh if this wall was drywalled and it was ready for the receptacle to go in i just want to start my two mounting screws and the wiring that we hooked up is just folding up nicely in behind all that so once you have your two screws started then you would just uh simply there there's kind of a slotted hole in there to do a little bit of the alignment so you just snug that up until the these ears here were snug against the drywall or whatever finishes on the wall okay so that's our first one now i guess obviously something i didn't mention and i should have is to make sure that your breaker is off to start with i guess one way you could check that is with one of these buzz sticks so basically this stick and these aren't 100 foolproof sometimes a bit of static electricity or even just a quick contact we'll set them off but basically these these buzz sticks if you uh turn it on you can see that you might be able to see that this one's flashing this one if it contacts a power wire it'll go solid red on the end and it'll buzz and in fact i do have a live wire down here so i can kind of show that so i've got it turned on and once i get to that i don't know if you can see but the end is glowing red and it's also sounded an alarm so the one problem with these like i said they're not not a hundred percent reliable because uh they're just not quite as pinpoint as they need to be because the fact is that if you had if you had these this red and this black wire close to each other and only one of them was powered i had electricity running through it and even if you touched the one that wasn't this might go off because you're in such close proximity uh usually you've got to be about an inch away so you know it isn't 100 accurate but it's it's a good thing it's easy to carry around and just kind of double check as you go so something else before we get on to the next receptacle if you're you know if you're not comfortable with this it's uh there's lots of these different books on electrical wiring and and even code that you can buy at your local hardware stores even your bookstores and uh it makes for some interesting reading now and again but just a bit of a refresher it can help you out if you run into a problem they've got some wiring diagrams in most of them even and that that most of the ones i've seen are pretty good they're fairly easy to follow so it wouldn't hurt just to do some reading up before you start any of these projects so now we're going to head down to the next receptacle in the line so it's being fed from the second set of wires that were in this this junction box so i'm just going to move down the wall there to the next one and i'll show you how to set it up okay so we've moved down the line here what i just showed you on that first receptacle would be exactly the same for every receptacle until you get to the very last one on the very last one there's no need to do a pigtail the very last one you're just going to have two wires coming in and nothing going out so i've kind of prepped this one all up it's really the same as what we did there on the other one as far as what i did on the ends of the pigtails is what you do on the main wiring here so i've stripped the end done the curls on them i didn't do the ground and of course i also first attached the ground right in the back there right onto the ground under the ground screw tighten it up and just brought that ground wire right out to here okay so i've got my receptacle i've already tightened up the two screws that we aren't going to use i can now attach the wiring we had right onto the screw so really the only difference here is we didn't do a big pigtail we're just uh we're just using the the same wire that came into the box so i just tighten these up and like i said on those side screws it really doesn't matter which screw you use unless you're doing a split receptacle which i'm not really going to get into here it's a whole other item i'll tighten this ground screw on there okay so we've got those all on i'm going to do a wrap tape around it and i'll just throw it on there quick like so just uh don't get your uh mounting screws tucked underneath the tape just give it a double check make sure your metal is all covered up and it is so now the only thing left to do would be to mount this back into the box just like we did on the other one so so really that's all i was trying to show here is you don't really need a pigtail on that last very last receptacle on the line so i think we've covered everything that people had questions with in our other video so uh for those of you that have already seen that and our subscribers you're probably wondering why we did this one well that's why just to cover some of the some of the things that people were asking about all the time so we thought we'd just replace that video with the new one so uh for those of you who are subscribers you obviously know where our youtube channel is you probably know where our website and the forum is so that's great for those of you who are maybe the first time seeing me do a video we do have the website at houseimprovements.com there's a forum there there's article topics there you can read all that there's also a link there under videos to our youtube channel and right there you can watch all the videos that we have on on other some other electrical systems and also all kinds of diy type projects so hopefully enjoy them all and thanks for watching

Channel: HouseImprovements

Views: 1,877,535

Rating: 4.8043513 out of 5

Keywords: electrical, wiring, receptacle, receptacles, How-to (Media Genre), how, to, 110v, 120v, 115v, plugin, plug-in, electricity, live, circuit, Power, renovate, reno, Change, house, home, add, upgrade

Id: yBEMzxV05ZA

Length: 24min 32sec (1472 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 21 2014