Plug Won't Stay In Outlet

hey guys how's it going it's scott with everyday home repairs and i want to talk a little bit about a very common problem in your home and that is when you have an outlet that just won't hold the plugs in and they just want to fall out now this is usually not as common if you have a three prong plug like this one usually that ground plug provides you a little bit more tension to hold into even a worn out outlet but if you have a two pronger really even the weight of the cord wants to pull that plug out of the outlet now this can obviously be a safety hazard because you start to expose a connected hot side piece of metal the blade from that plug going in so that is a big safety hazard and also it's just a pain in the butt you probably if you've been at a hotel and you try to plug in your phone and the outlet just literally will not hold the plug at all that's because that's probably the outlet that is where the vacuum's being plugged in every day so vacuums being plugged in every day it's pulling quite a bit of current creating heat so it really wears out those outlets so i'm going to show you what's going on inside i'm actually going to remove this and break it open and show you what's going on inside and then obviously also how to fix that what kind of outlet should you be putting in place so you don't have this issue going forward so let's jump into it so first thing when removing this outlet one we want to make sure the power is cut off so we're going to hit the circuit breaker or the fuse depending on what your setup is now you can use either use a non-contact voltage tester and you can tell the outlet is still hot now through many many hundreds of comments through some of my videos most licensed electricians or at least some of them really don't like the non-contact they don't prefer the non-contact to give you a strong indication whether or not the plug is still hot so you can get a simple outlet tester now both of these links will be down in the description if you want to reference what i'm using here and then i have two amber color lights on that means the outlet is working and it's powered but now i need to go hit the breaker to make sure i cut power both to the top and bottom outlets all right so now we can see that all lights are off so this is this is no longer powered from our outlet tester and then also the non-contact would give us the same so now we're safe to remove this outlet and then i'll cut this open and show you what's going on all right so removal is going to be easy enough we'll take the two screws out so we can remove the outlet from the electrical box then you'll start to loosen up all the different screw terminals now you might not have two hots and two neutrals coming in and also your wire colors might be different red is the hot side for me black might be your hot side and white is my neutral most likely yours is also white and then i have a green wire for ground you'll probably have a bare copper wire you'll probably have to open up those j hooks or shepard hooks a little bit to get them from out around the screw terminal and do be careful if you have short wires and not much extra wire be careful not to damage the insulation because you're going to need to reuse as much wire as possible so you don't make it too short to make it difficult to rewire the new outlet so we'll finish off removing the two neutrals here and then we'll open up this old outlet so i wanted to open up that outlet just to give you a closer look of what's going on here and overall the construction of this uh out that i i like uh it's much better than the cheaper ones these days this is a leviton that's the the same replacement i'll be using but what happened is the clearances here that would hold the blades on a plug have really opened up so i can pass this wire between those now if i were to take a new commercial spec outlet right and try to pass that same wire it ain't happening so it's much tighter this is brand new obviously not used so from heat and just use over time it's really opened up and that is why it's not holding here's an example two prong from an apple charger and even putting that in there i mean it's not holding it at all so you can pass it through so this is why at hotels maybe some outlets around your house are having that issue as they've just been used over time and they're worn out and they can no longer hold the neutral and hot side of the plug so it's time to swap that out now what should you swap that out with i did a video breaking down these two different outlets and you can see that link right here if you want to go deeper this is a standard residential grade it's not tamper resistant so this one would be about 50 cents this is a commercial spec made by leviton both of these made by love time both of these 15 amp and this is about two dollars i recommend this guy now in your area to the code you're most likely going to need tamper resistant pretty much everywhere now you need tamper resistant where you're not able to introduce any sort of object to one side where somebody could get shocked you have to apply to both sides for that to open up this is the equivalent residential here and i do not recommend that it's it's just overall pretty cheaply made if you're taking the time to replace whether that's you or you're hiring that out go ahead and get yourself at least one step up with just a commercial grade tamper resistant like i said most likely for your application and also to follow the coding area one additional nice thing about this commercial is it has the feature where you can do back wire so you're not going to have to do those shepard hooks which would usually if you're going to do it if you're going to do a shepherd hook or a j-hook around the screw remember it goes clockwise around and then you want all copper no insulation being pinched between the screw as you tighten it down but we're going to use back wire which there's always a strip gauge here so you can match up to the strip gauge to know sorry it's on the other side you can match up to the strip gauge and know how much copper you need and then you can pass that right straight in and then screw that down and that plate is going to hold that in place and it's going to securely hold your hot neutral side and then you will have to do a shepherd's hook for the ground so let me show you how to install that okay so now with the outlet remember that gold is your hot side and then the silver it's going to be your neutral side so i'm going to use back wire so i'll quickly go through and i'm going to cut and strip these i have plenty of wire so i'm not worried about cutting these too short but i'm going to cut them and re-strip them to the correct size so i can get them ready to back wire [Music] now one note when you're using this the strippers you you're probably comfortable with them but if not you're going to have your gauge of wire listed on the left hand side if it's solid core so this would be used for 12 gauge which is what i used if you used a 14 you're going to also damage the copper which is going to weaken it and that's going to cause you problems long term so make sure that you're using the correct hole for the size of wire that you have and it should also be noted that you you want to make sure you're matching up the same outlet so this is a 15 amp many outlets are 20 amp so i didn't talk about earlier but i did confirm that the old outlet that i'm replacing is 15 amp so first i'm going to put the ground on there what i'm going to do is close up that shepherd's hook a little bit around the screw so there's good contact all the way around and then i'll go ahead and tighten that remember clockwise direction for your wire all right so now that i have two hots and two neutrals that i need to install i'm gonna put the two hots on the same screw terminal these are made to fit two wires one on each side and then the two neutrals on the on the top on the opposite side remember gold for hot silver for neutral okay and then i am you probably have a plastic electrical box i actually have a metal one but best practice any unused terminals you do want to go ahead and screw those all the way in just to make sure you have less likelihood especially on the hot side if you had a metal box that that you would hit a screw terminal on something that it could go short it could short across that so just check your work make sure everything's secure everything looks right there's no weak points and then start to tuck your wires back into the box so then you can tighten down your mounting screws so it should be noted here the wall has some wood paneling on it so the standard three quarters of an inch mounting screw did not work so i had to upgrade do a little comparison here to a one inch now while i put on the cover plate if you do need those longer screws that are 6-32 pan head machine screw you can pretty much get them at any ace hardware right so the power is back on so we'll do a quick check with our outlets tester both on the bottom looks good and top also looks good and then the true test the issue where the two prong plugs or even really three plug prong plugs were basically falling out so now we have a nice secure hold and we won't have any issues for years to come hopefully that helped you out and also gave you a little bit more details on what's going on on the inside of the outlet when you have those plugs basically falling out now before you take off don't forget to subscribe to our channel if you haven't already we have weekly videos coming out to help you with your repairs and improvements around the house and we'll catch you on the next one take care

Channel: Everyday Home Repairs

Views: 2,029,302

Keywords: plug falls out of outlet, plug falls out of electrical outlet, how to change an outlet, how to fix an old outlet

Id: 0h_r2bD5bMs

Length: 11min 13sec (673 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 30 2020