Outdoor Outlets on Deck or Pergola | Skip the Conduit!

I recently built myself a deck and found myself needing outdoor outlets on that deck however you don't need a deck in order to utilize this video if you need outdoor Outlets then this video will show you how I did it know that a lot of people's first choice is to run conduit because you need it to be watertight however there is a different path and I show you those things if you don't want to go through the household running conduit now in my situation I'm going to be taking power from my garage so I went and first located the panel and then figured out a path to go from the panel out to my situation which is an outdoor deck I just built to do this I ran a new wire through an existing conduit fish through the walls and made connections now I already have an existing conduit line here but if you didn't the whole premise to take away is to run a straight line or as straight as possible to the side that you're trying to get power to personally I love pushing wire connectors but with most stranded wire bends and frays when you push it in with these ideal ensure lever connectors you raise the lever and Stranded slips right in no problem then with stranded or solid removing wire is easy as releasing the lever once I had the exterior wiring almost done I made my way to the outside first I cut a hole in the drywall size for a plastic access panel the panel is going to cover the hole later and save me the trouble of patching drywall this is just a garage then I board a hole diagonally through the concrete aiming to pop out through the rim of the deck this definitely took a while foreign with the boring job done pun intended I fed a cable up to my garage and made final connections by the way these are my favorite wire strippers because they have notches that cut the Romex jacket fast and easy they're made by ideal and I'll leave a link in the description foreign A GFCI here in the garage wall something a lot of people don't know about gscis is you have a line and a load side that you need to pay attention to when you're making your connections so I did all my incoming power to the line Terminals and the outgoing to the low terminals with the GFCI in place all Downstream Outlets under my deck are going to be protected one last thing inside this cable hole is definitely a perfect pathway for pus so I sealed it with dapp's barrier multi-project foam this is an expanding foam that is a four-way protection not only good for all season but it's good for water draft and for pests your Critters aren't going to want to chew through it with the cabling outside I could finally wire the deck which is the easy part of this project let me pause and think this video sponsor which is ship station we live in an increasingly automated world but something still required tedious manual work luckily for e-commerce business owner shipping is no longer a manual task thanks to ship station save time automating your shipping and returns in the ship station dashboard while keeping costs down with industry leading discounts look guys I have an Etsy store Amazon WordPress Shopify and instead of going to multiple platforms every day to check orders shipstation makes it simple by giving me One dashboard to log into and create all all my labels from I not only get better shipping rates than what I was getting on my own but I can also do bulk label printing if you are shipping anything there is no reason not to take advantage of their free trial it is very quick and simple to set up spend more time growing your business by automating shipping tasks with ship station you go to shipstation.com April today to sign up for a free 60-day trial that's shipstation.com April now of course the big issue with electricity under a duck is that it has a chance to get wet and electricity and water absolutely don't mix and that's why you see a lot of people utilizing conduit and running Romex through it because you just need it to be water tight and that definitely works like I said in the beginning but a different option is to switch from Romex over to something called UF when running UF you follow all the same roles you would with Romex and doors for example UF has to be supported every four and a half feet along Joyce foreign you can bore holes through them to run cable through to avoid weakening Joys you want to keep your holes within the middle third or you can skip all of that drilling by going under the joist but if you do that you need a continuous 2 by or one by to staple a cable tail when you get to the outlet locations you'll need exterior junction boxes exterior boxes are watertight of course but I like to drill an eighth inch weep hole at the bottom that way if water does get in it can drain out stripping the jacket off UF is kind of a pain I separate the three wires with pliers then cut the jacket off using the largest notches on my wire strippers where cables enter the box you'll need a watertight glands designed for UF cable you just screw the gland on the box insert the cable and then tighten the nut to compress the rubber gasket around the cable and remember that exterior Outlets require an in-use cover now let me walk you through what the outlets need to look like actually on the deck here is my UF that comes up where I want an outlet I'm going to be placing these near the base of my post because I want a golf simulator to be ran out this way so I'm keeping it low to the ground you can't just stick UF or any uh cabling in a cut off piece of conduit like this you need a male threaded coupler however I don't want to go to the underside of the deck and show you so the way that it would work is this would be mounted underneath the deck boards like so and then this you would feed up your wiring UF into the junction box and then screw it wherever you want now you can grab whatever Outlet you want I'm personally going to go with some that have USBS on them and then make all of your connections like normal now if you're going to be outside it is required by code to have some sort of covering in fact let me walk you down to this next outlet outlet that is complete and show you so here's the in use cover and this is required for any external outlet and what this does is it lets you keep something plugged in and that's why they call it in use but then the cover will prevent any water from getting in now underneath the deck is where you see my well you don't see but it's where I put my my Mill threaded coupler and then the UF comes up here I made all of my terminations inside here and then this is going to allow me to plug it in be in use and not be creating any sort of Hazards and then you see on the top of these boxes I even have a threaded Port here and there is a plug down there that water can't get inside this box but should I ever want to extend more outlets in the future I could just run conduit up and then go out whichever ways I know electricity can be a little bit intimidating definitely check with your local codes and there's nothing wrong with if wiring is not for you then definitely hiring it out but if you do want to tackle it yourself and just want the basic how-to's then know that I have an entire playlist on many different situations where I've pulled power or extended it or installed 240. so I'll leave you a link to that playlist down in the description hope that you found some good tips and tricks and alternatives to running conduit if you're looking for something outdoor and watertight leave me a comment watch the deck series if you haven't seen it already and I'll see you on my next video guys [Music]

Channel: April Wilkerson

Views: 207,259

Keywords: aprilwilkerson, wilkerdos, diy, diyproject, diyprojects, build, plans, howto, outdoor outlet, exterior outlet, pool oultet, wiring a pool, wiring, 115 volt, 115v, 120 volt, 120v, wiring gfci, outdoor tv, wire a deck, uf cable, cable glands, deck ideas, patio ideas, pergola ideas, outdoor audio, outdoor stereo, outdoor speakers, electrical wiring, pvc conduit, in use outlet cover, romex, nm cable, pool pump, pool heater, outdoor lighting, fishing wire

Id: ZgukNcsFWyc

Length: 8min 8sec (488 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 10 2023