How To Work on LIVE CIRCUITS - Replacing Circuit Breakers in Old ZINSCO Panel

this is going to stay hot the whole time i can't pull my meter out because there's actually a utility provided meter lock so i can't disconnect any of that without having a serious fine so i'm just going to do this hot [Music] so [Music] today we're going to be taking all of my old zinsco breakers out of my panel this is an old outlaw panel zinsco a lot of older brands like eagle federal pacific zinsco pushmatic they're outlawed because they would actually create fires so a lot of times in here the bus would start to go bad or where the breakers actually hook up to the bus can go bad it can start creating hot spots and start burning out or there's loose terminations breakers don't actually trip just how they were manufactured back then where the ansi standards were i'm sorry where the ul standards were it just allowed for a little bit less durability and less quality assurance let's say uh for the products so connecticut electric actually sent me these these are brand new breakers that are up to today's standards and they're they're made just to be able to replace all of this stuff i've checked this panel out the actual bus is fine there's nothing wrong with anything in this panel this house was built in 1968 so this is the original panel for this house and i've known i need to replace it coming up there's going to be some videos soon where i do replace the service rebuild it and kind of show you guys how all that works but i just wanted to show you replacing all of these things and show you kind of how it works and talk through the process this is 100 amp main again there's really nothing wrong with this breaker a lot of times i would save all these old breakers anytime i would work on a system like this or anytime we would take something out i would always save all these breakers because you get that one service call where it's like saturday night you know you can't get new materials for anything but you need to save or you need to come up with a breaker for one of these old legacy panels so it's nice to just keep a few of them and have them on the back burner as a temporary solution so you can whip one out get little grandma on saturday night so her power is still on and then you can come back and actually replace it replace the service do whatever you got to do um which you don't really have to do anymore i mean now we have these replacement breakers uh so you can just leave these things in they're actually good they're guaranteed for 10 years they have a 10-year warranty on them so connecticut electric really stands behind their products and these little screws always want to strip out they're tiny itty-bitty little screws um and they just they're it's such weak soft stuff that you got to be really careful taking these things out unless you're taking them out for good then you don't really have to worry about it see these have a lot more uh sturdy um you know thicker screws so how this goes in is this little thing has to hook on the back side here so it's kind of a pain in the butt to snap these in place these just slide into those grooves that's pretty obvious but you got to get this thing in first so kind of do that and then it just rocks down in place always make sure that your breakers are off when you go to put a breaker in don't leave it in the on condition if your main is live like mine is i'm not actually pulling my meter to work on this so from the meter in these wires are actually live i'm a master electrician i'm not worried about this i know what i'm doing i'm going to be very very safe when i'm working in here this isn't something that you want to do live if you have the choice to you know have the power taken off that's something you do but a lot of times we don't have that convenience on the field so again master electrician i'm taking my own liability this is my own house and i know what i'm doing so i'm going to leave this live this breaker still has live power run into it but i've killed the bus so when i shut that off all of the rest of these breakers are now off so this bus in here is dead this breaker's not feeding through to the buses now i'm just going to work my way up and keep going and i'm going to leave the main to be the last thing that way i just know working in here that i'm dead the entire way and just leave the hot work to the very last these are kind of a pain in the butt to pull out too like notice what i'm doing you can't just like yank them out i take the handle i kind of grab over here with my hand then i take the handle and start adding pressure to it these are old so i don't really care if i break them or anything like that but then i take this hand over here too and i kind of help push both of them wiggle them a little bit and then it pops out all right so this is a two pole 30 which means number tens this last one was a two pole 20 which should be number 12 wires it is so let's take these off again these tiny little screws now some of you may be wondering why is he putting a white wire onto a breaker and it is a white wire but it is not a neutral this is actually a 220 breaker and i'll show you here in a second it's been i re-identified as a red now when i'm doing this if i was going to be the one you know installing something like this i would always make sure to put that red tape up here so you can see it clearly as you're looking down like this one is up here it's identified right outside of the breaker so you know for sure that it's red most people in a panel know what is going on in this situation but anyways this is identified as red i just wanted to make that clear so again we kind of have to pull these wires out of the way just to be able to get this back in its place so that it can lock in snap it in place we're good to go next one oh my god some of these suck to get out of here sometimes you gotta pry and be a little a little less gentle with it so if you notice these are two pole 20 breakers two pole 20 amp meaning two poles and 20 amps per pole um this is not a 220 circuit this is actually two 120 volt circuits it's just that the breaker has two spots so these can actually be turned on independent of each other whereas if it was a 220 load like this you want to make sure that when you flip it if one of them trips they both trip because it's serving a 220 load and this old system they didn't do that they didn't have a breaker tie but there is a little hole in here where you could stick a breaker tie to make sure that the handles tripped at the same time if you had a 220 load so just a quick tidbit a little note for you now this one has a lot of conductors sticking out of the backside plus the uh the conductor itself is pretty smashed so i'm just going to cut that off cut this guy off as well i don't want that much conductor showing see that's better you don't have any conductor sticking out of the back of the breaker i think that's pretty darn important [Music] so [Music] now we're going to get into this live conductor so what i'm going to do is put some ppe on this is going to stay hot the whole time i can't pull my meter out because there's actually a utility provided meter lock so i can't disconnect any of that without having a serious fine so i'm just going to do this hot now i don't recommend anybody out there does hot work ever really there's never a reason justified or good enough to do hot work if you can avoid it now there are certain circumstances i've done enough industrial and commercial service work to know that when there's like a 10 million production line going you just have to keep power on you can't just shut millions of dollars worth of production down or you know like kill all of the cash registers in the middle of like a you know dinner rush or some kind of thing like that like there's just situations that arise where you need to be able to work on power live there's plenty of personal protection gear out there they make flash shoots they make you know face masks they make hot gloves they make boots they make all kinds of like rubber mats so there is equipment out there that is designed for people to do live work so the whole argument that you should never do work live or that you it's okay like you stop being a wuss like you can do a lot you know like neither of those narratives are responsible i think the best way to think about the situation is always minimize risk as electricians we deal with this is dangerous stuff like by far the one of the most dangerous trades in construction we need to minimize risk as a general rule of thumb to be a good quality electrician to know what you're doing to be effective and safe and to go home to your family and make sure all of your guys go home to their family and girls go home to their families at the end of the night it's your responsibility to minimize risk at all times so the best thing to do is to never work on stuff live when you don't have to but if you have to use the proper p e p p e slow down take your time train people well so that they know what they're getting into i'll do some safety videos so maybe you guys can come across some safety tips but i am the master electrician this is my house this is my liability i feel comfortable doing this because i've done hot work so much throughout my career on multiple voltage systems medium voltage stuff you know 480 volt live i've worn flash suits all the whole nine yards so i know how to handle this situation so all of that to say you're going to see me do live work with ppe on and a flash helmet this is something that i'm doing to protect myself because i just want to minimize the risk this is not how you have to do it this is just how i'm choosing to do it but i am going to do this live because there is no breaker that's going to shut this off if this thing arcs it's going to be a crazy arc big explosion and still no breaker is going to trip so it's just going to be live in my hands so many of you have never worn hot gloves before these are um these are called leather protectors the outside it's just a regular glove it's made out of leather and these are the actual gloves they're rated at a bunch of different ratings this is a thousand volt rated class zero size 10 um but you should always keep a pair of hot gloves on you just in case you know just in case you ever run into a situation where you need to all right so my breaker is off first thing i'm going to do is i'm going to disconnect one conductor [Applause] [Applause] all right that is a live conductor [Applause] and what i'm going to do so it's not just sitting there and you know i forget and like bump my arm into it and shock myself i'm actually going to put the other breaker on this wire right now this wire is hot and it's funny like we say that this it has potential on it right this has 120 degree or 120 volts of potential to ground or to neutral it's not hot you know just the idea that it's a hot wire uh is a funny you know funny way of communicating you notice that i'm touching it there's no problem with this at all i've got these gloves they're highly insulated no current's going to go through it plus i'm only touching this with one hand i'm not touching this and something metal i could because i have these gloves on it's not going to go through me but you're just when people think they're getting shocked by touching a wire i can even touch this with my my regular skin and not get shocked because i'm not grounded i'm not touching anything else but i'm not going to do that for this video because i don't want anybody to misunderstand and just start touching hot wires so i'm not going to show you an example of that so first off let's get these guys loosened there are some little rubber pieces in here [Applause] [Music] you see that there's little rubber pieces in there that's kind of weird i don't know why they do that all right so that was my top conductor so i'm going to make sure that i put it on my top conductor here remember this is a live conductor which now means this and this piece of metal are live and the breaker is in off position i made sure that but if it wasn't if it was in the on position this would also be connected so this would be live this would be live and this would be live so you want to make sure it's off so again you're just minimizing this one thing that is alive so this is the safest way we can do this right now i've got one conductor taken care of it's less chance that anything's going to shock me or surprise me i'm just going to leave this thing hang down there for right now now i'm going to deal with my second conductor loosen it up and put a hand on it just so it doesn't spring out all right got that loose all right now just again minimizing risk i want to put this right back into something so that i make sure i don't shock myself and now that it is in the breaker i actually feel a whole lot better that when i go to handle this thing i know exactly where to touch and i'm not worried about wires flopping off anywhere now i can get this really crazy difficult breaker out um i tried removing this earlier with the wires in it and this thing is just so cinched in there that with live conductors on it i just didn't want to risk anything bouncing around not flopping off see that was kind of difficult and if those wires were loose in there they probably would have went boom you know like hit something so i'm going to get rid of that now i'm going to very carefully with these live conductors breaker in the off position always always put in a breaker in the off position i'm going to bend these out of the way a little bit again i got to get that hook in this thing so that'll slap down another reason that you want to make sure that you have the breaker in the off position is because if you go to put this in it's going to start parking and making sure all of these are off too you don't want like random loads throughout the house turning on and frying because you keep arcing and creating a situation where you're going to destroy any loads all right so i've got that hooked in she does not want to sit very well in there oh this is another reason you want to have ppe on when you're doing this stuff because i'm working on live conductors right now and it's not going how i want it's not acting right let me just make sure that there's nothing back there that's causing it to happen cleaning the butt i don't see any reason why it would not be going in these pieces of metal you know are kind of thick but like they're pretty much the same size of all of it you know what this bus over here actually looks like it's a little damaged check this out that bus where it connects actually looks like it's got some damage on it it looks like maybe there was some arcing somebody uh somebody maybe you know like shorted something out in there got all that black charring on the one on the left that's not good which for now is okay because i'm going to be replacing this whole service in the next few weeks so for now this is just gonna have to do but that's what you're that's the kind of stuff that you're looking for um problems with this so the fact that i gotta hammer this thing in there because my bus is messed up um i didn't see that before i didn't notice that so that's a really good thing to know and you should not have to hit a breaker that damn hard to get to go in but we got it all in all right so now what i'm going to do is i'm going to turn my main back on you know first thing i'm going to do is i'm going to get my multimeter out and i just want to check i can take this thing off now that i'm done working with that take my hot gloves off done working with that all right so now we're going to get our trusty multimeter out i want to test just make sure that there's nothing crazy going on this is my trusty t5 love this thing t5-600 from fluke so what i'm going to test for is i'm going to go to each one of these make sure that there is no weird uh short i've got 249 volts so i'm on my voltage setting i got a good 240 in then i'm going to go from one phase down to neutral shows 125. next phase down to neutral 125 my neutrals and grounds are bonded so it looks like we have a good voltage reading i feel comfortable that everything's hooked up correctly so now i'm going to energize my main all right good to go we should on our bus get a voltage reading 249. we're good to go there we still got 120 from each phase to neutral and ground so we're good now i feel comfortable turning on individual loads all right everything's holding handles are a little loose and wiggly but that's okay tap on them nothing's gonna fly back means they're all holding like they should and let's see how much current we've got so i'm going to switch over to amps i'm going to use this jaw and clamp on each one of my main service entrance conductors you can see on that one that we've got 2.8 amps on my b phase on my a phase it's kind of hard to read we got 3.9 amps so uh not a lot on right now it's probably because we just shut everything off so everything's starting to come back online now one thing i do need to do is this knockout you know we need to put a knockout seal in that and make sure that it sealed somebody get their fingers up inside of it i'm not going to worry about that again i'm actually going to be replacing this service here in the next couple weeks especially since i found that that a bad spot on that bus i'm just taking this whole thing out and i'm going to replace it later but it's really nice to know that we have breakers that are brand new certified they come with a warranty they're protected for 10 years they're not old and worn and decrepit you know it's something that was actually created recently and you can find these at home depot a lot of your different supply houses but you can walk into home depot and they're actually on the shelf not even just for zinsco but there's pushmatic there's a challenger federal pacific there's a lot of other stuff that they have so it's really just cool to know that if there is a problem you can really quickly just go off the shelf grab a replacement breaker for these old systems instead of being like oh crap i wish i would have saved some breakers from the last service that i just replaced because you don't want to be using that old stuff that old stuff has not been classified under ul listings it hasn't been updated hasn't been freshly made and tested you want to be using something that is brand new that's still off the shelf so that's all i got for you [Music] foreign

Channel: Electrician U

Views: 492,209

Keywords: electrician, electricity, dustin stelzer, apprentice, journeyman, master, electrician vlog, commercial, electrical vlog, electrician show, trade school, electrical courses, electrician courses, electrician class, electrician school, circuit breaker, circuit breakers, circuit, breaker, electrical panel, electrical safety, osha, arc flash, zinsco, federal pacific electric panel, federal pacific panel, federal pacific, home improvement, circuit breaker panel, main breaker, fuse box

Id: 5YNLC80clS8

Length: 24min 19sec (1459 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 02 2020