Make An Electrical Pigtail Residential Wiring

hey good morning and hey howdy we're here today and we're going to do some pigtailing i know you're like james how do you how do you understand so intuitively what i want to know about i know things [Music] so pig tailing is when we have a device and i've already demoed this and we're adding another set of wires and when we're let's say we're adding a plug and there's not enough spaces to add all those wires okay and what you'll see a lot of times is wires when you pull these things out wires doubled up under screws which is wrong uh you'll see stuff forced into the back end it's too large it's wrong okay so we want to do is be able to add a wire pig tail it and pigtailing means we're going to have the tails our short pieces of wire so it's your plug no matter how many wires are inside your box you only have one set coming to the plug here's the other advantage a lot of times when you have older plugs and wiring when you plug something in here and you move it around you'll notice it'll cut on and off with a light switch without turning it off you'll move the switch back and forth and the lights will flicker on enough loose connections and if you have an older house a lot of times pig tailing will get rid of loose connections and voltage drop okay so today we're going to pigtail and we're up here in shock and oz uh hold and layer of work and terror it's pretty cool so obviously imagine your house with you know beautiful drywall paint but this is cool because i can beat it up and my wife's not going to yell at me super cool so we already have two sets of wires i advise you of course that once you take off your plug and you're going to do this is take a meter and let's make sure we have no power i've got nothing there well 0.29 it's feedback or static or whatever we're good i can handle this i'm not going to kill myself today at least not on video so we're going to add a third set of wires just for the sake of uh showing you how to pigtail and we're going to add that to our plug now again when you're doing this in an existing house obviously you don't have the luxury of uh seeing all this this is going up to somewhere ah a new tv plug upstairs outside somewhere the point is is we're adding a third set of wires and we want to put a plug back in okay so process here because we're eliminating loose connections is you want good solid connections okay so we're gonna put all of our grounds together neutrals together and we're also going to make them the same length because whoever here was be before we had extra wire so i'm going to cut these off i don't trust the old connections i'm going to make my own connections don't be lazy a lot of you like i don't want to strip wire well you know what you need to learn how to strip wire it's good for you okay learn how to change oil learn how to split wood how to build a house why not okay so we want at least by code we're supposed to have at least six inches outside the front of the box but depending on how old your house is you may not have six inches you want as much as you can get comfortably i'm trimming these all the length i'm gonna leave the ground long and i'll show you why in a second we're now stripping the wires we want to make sure that nothing's nicked if it's a little long it's okay it won't hurt anything sorry paul don't want to hit paul with a flying piece of plastic here he's doing a great job by the way okay and then with our grounds i'm gonna do a ground pigtail here i don't usually i use something different usually but again the wires are a little short so this is a training area we've used this this box has been used about a dozen times so it's been it's been road hard and put up wet a bunch you'll notice the studs all have holes in them with no wire that's all because we've been training and drilling and wiring and pulling it all back out okay trim the ends got me a wire nut if you've pulled off old wire nuts don't reuse them don't do it it's like i'm gonna save 14 cents yeah you are but you're gonna cause future problems so this is pig tailing we've taken three three wires and then we added the tail the pigtail there you go so the ground is now pigtailed okay now let's do the same thing with the neutrals okay get them lined up you want to get your uh your insulation point here where the white wire is or where the right insulation is you want that even a lot of guys will say well line up the copper but if your copper isn't stripped evenly it won't matter you can trim it okay so we're twisting wow there we go even twists we're going to add a neutral pigtail here you go another way to make this easier is just add a little pre-bend lay it down alongside the other ones and you're twisting clockwise hmm that one's not so pretty let's see if we can dress it up before we put our wire nut on it yeah that's that's not great so here's what you're going to do like i'm going to do you're going to say i don't like that strain out your wire so what was happening is the wire was riding up so instead of just mashing a wire nut on it and hoping it stays connected when you're basically just buying trouble for three or four months down the road we're going to do it again i'm going to pull nice get turned i'm going to use a slightly larger wire nut there we go good so a lot of times people are asking well how tight should i do that you want to do it in tight enough so that your wires and your bundle start to twist with it to that point it's tight enough it's not going anywhere okay we have our ground pigtail we're going to roll in the neutral pigtail which turns out to be slightly short push that back hot pigtail so as mentioned earlier voltage drop and a lot of times when these wires have been stabbed into the back of old plugs which they're going to be about at least 15 years old manufacturers changed it about that time or the code did so that you can't stab number 12s which is what these are into the back of plugs and the reason was the number 12 was so stiff that the little pieces of metal that captured the copper where you stabbed it in the back would get loose and you would have um intermittent power caused by the stab ends in the back of the plug and that's uh probably a bad design it was a lot of business for me we did a lot of um a lot of pigtailing once again i let it ride up so let's back it up and redo it what we're looking for is a neat bundle okay we don't want wires to be crossed and super hideous here and then we're going to bind twist it up so at this point we're actually pigtailed so now the circuit is continuous in other words we have three paths of power one two three that don't depend on the plug to keep their continuity when you use the plug to hold the wires if the plug fails then everything that's coming that's going out of this box will drop okay so let's say this wires are power in and then these two are power out right now they're connected pretty darn solid in the back of the box with pigtails with wire nuts so even if this plug fails the worse that's going to happen is this plug will go dead but everything that goes out of here will stay on and while we're standing here we might as well uh miles will wire up the plug okay some of you already know this trick but your wire strippers will have these holes and you can just put them in there make your little hook it's fantastic okay again your hooks are going on so they're turned the same way as you're tightening clockwise the screws you don't use i even tighten those down i mean not as tight obviously by tightening them down to me it seems uh like poor practice leave something sticking out that might touch in short so even the screws you're not using tighten them up cinch them down get them out of the way there you go close this around the screw nice connection not bad it'll work okay almost done so the pig tailing will work the same way i did this with the plug we could pre-bend these so it folds back in the box there we go make sure that the ground wire is not going to ride back up so this could be a switch box let's say you have a multiple gang switch box and you're going to add a switch leg let's say for new cans or a new light you're going to have to tie the neutrals in it has to be pigtailed okay or you're adding to the hot bundle but the point being is the pig tailing saves a lot of future problems and it makes sure even on new construction it makes sure that your power is continuous all the way through okay so thanks for spending the time pigs and tails it's a great time thank you very much by all means click like subscribe and if you have any questions you guys have been doing great on the channel if you have any questions shoot them in there let's answer them have a good day

Channel: abrelectric

Views: 25,826

Keywords: allen tx electrician, Electrician in Plano TX, Electrician in McKinney TX, pigtail, electrical pigtail, wire pigtail, Do it yourself, how to make an electrical pigtail, how to wire an electrical pigtail, how to pigtail electrical wire, pigtail an outlet, pigtail wiring, electrical wire connection, wire nut connections, electrician near me, Collin County Electricians, abrelectric

Id: bRWMS3276_Y

Length: 11min 33sec (693 seconds)

Published: Sat May 15 2021