Inspectors Inc | Electrical Inspection

[Music] hi i'm anthony from inspectors inc we're at a residential home today and i'm going to show you the typical things that we inspect when we do the electrical inspection okay so for the electrical inspection it starts with the service coming to the house there's two types of service it's either overhead coming from the pole to the building or it's Underground coming from the ground coming up and goes to the meter typically the electric company is responsible for everything up to the meter after the meter it is the homeowners responsibility so these are the components that we're checking it's the ones right after the meter the most important one is the grounding rod or grounding system they can either use a ground rod which is into the ground and connected to the electrical systems grounding system or they can connect it to a water line assuming that the pipes in the house are metal if they're not metal it has to be a ground rod and I'll show you what those look like the nice thing about this house is it actually has two grounding systems it's not required to have both but if one ever gets damaged or deteriorated then you have the other system as a backup ground it's a pretty good idea so let me show you what some of the different types of grounds are this one here is a ground rod the ground rod is typically six feet into the ground and only a little bit of it sticks up and they have here's your ground wire and it is fastened directly to the ground rod the other one we talked about is when when the electrical ground is connected to metal piping assuming the house has metal piping so let's take a look at that okay so this is the copper pipe coming into the house and if you'll notice there's the ground wire okay and it's clamped directly to the pipe we do check to make sure that these ground clamps are nice and snug because if they're not snug guess what no ground okay so after the meter that the power source goes into a distribution boss also called an electrical panel the main electrical panel consists of a main disconnect or main shutoff and then the branch circuits which are each have their own individual circuit breaker the reason you want two main disconnect is because you want one movement to shut off all the electricity to the house should there be a problem or electrical problem within the house that's the best way to do it one pole turns it all off you can also turn these off individually but that takes longer so that's the reason why we have the main disconnect also the main disconnect is rated for an amperage the amperage is the maximum amount of electricity that this house can use in this particular case is 200 amps and that's sufficient to run the house the swimming pool and a spa if there was over current meaning the house was drawing too much electricity for any reason at all the main breaker would shut off by itself without tripping the individual breakers however if you have one appliance for instance the stove is malfunctioning and it's using too much electricity instead of it causing a fire it will trip the breaker individually so and you look at that you'll notice that they'll have a little red spot on them in the window glass if they've tripped the way you reset them as a turn it completely off and then turn it back on however however if it trips again you know you got a problem you need to call licensed electrician one of the things when we tell people before we take this panel off is you don't ever want to touch anything inside that panel it is energized and it is very dangerous so if you do take the panel we recommend that nobody takes the panel off except a licensed electrician or someone trained to do so like the home inspector so the way this is laid out is you have your main feeds coming in and they're either made from copper or aluminum and in the report will describe what they are what type they are the main disconnect the size of the capacity which in this case of 200 amps and we're also going to take a look at each individual circuit breaker what we're looking for is we're looking for the size of the breaker and then the size of the each individual wire if you'll notice these wires are quite a bit thicker than these wires here these this is a 30 amp breaker and this is a 15 amp breaker and you can see the wires are quite a bit thinner so we want to make sure they match you don't want to have a 30 amp breaker with a 10 or 15 amp wire because it will overheat the wire and that's a fire hazard so those are the things that we're checking for inside the panel the other thing we're checking for is a thing called double lugging where they'll put two or more branch circuit wires into a breaker some breakers are designed for multiple wires most of them are not so we're going to check to make sure that they're properly installed okay so the next thing in the electrical system that we recheck is the actual appliances or the lights the outlets on the switches and one of the things I want to show you this is a really neat device as well a little trade secret these you can get at most hardware stores or outlet testers you want to get them one with a little button in there because it has tests what's called GFI ground fault circuit interrupter any outlet within six feet of water or exterior outlets or kitchens or bathrooms again within six feet of water should be GFI protected the reason being is they're so to protect in any individual so they don't get shocked is the outlet malfunctions the way to test that is you simply plug it in there and it lights up in this case it's telling me that it's properly wired so you can check this on any outlet to see that it's properly wired if it's not properly wired it has a nice little code here which tells you what the little lights mean so you can see that two yellow dots means that it's correct and then any variation other than that so it's a great little device to do your own check for you now the other neat thing is when you press the button over here you can see that it will check for GFI and there it is this is the GFI outlet in a garage just wire to a couple of other outlets as well and it has the reset button in there and it did trip when it was tested that means it is functioning properly so it is supposed to shut the power off when we add a ground fault to it so get yourself one of these testers if you want to check your outlets yourself it's a great way to do that it was very expensive there about ten bucks [Music]

Channel: Inspectors Inc.

Views: 19,983

Rating: 4.7205238 out of 5

Keywords: Home Inspection, Electrical

Id: twThLfV2g-U

Length: 6min 15sec (375 seconds)

Published: Mon May 01 2017