Short Wires? NO PROBLEM! How To Extend Short Wires!

chances are at some point you're going to want to change a switch or an outlet in your house you go to pull your switch out and it will only come out that far now this means that the last person cut the wires too short well fear not my friends because in today's video I'm going to show you exactly how to extend those wires so to reach that switch or Outlet before we do anything with electricity we need to make sure we have isolated power to the Circuit so we'll head out and flip off these circuit breaker and now that the circuit breaker is off we can go ahead and remove the terminals from the switch we want to [Music] replace now that we've got our switch off as you can see those wires are much too short they're about 3 in in length total and we need them to come out at least 3 in outside of the box so first we'll take our linman's pliers and we're just going to snip off the hooks if you try to bend those back most likely it's going to put a weak spot in the copper and they could break now that we've got our hooks cut off we're going to need to strip back enough wire to fit into the splice connection so as you can see sometimes your big splicers won't work you're going to need to get your smaller splicers in there strip off about 3/4 of an inch of insulation off each of the three conductors now of course the first thing you're going to want to do is just make sure you can't pull any more length out as you can see it's not coming out any further sometimes there's a service Loop behind your wall and you can pull those connectors out and add your length that way so first I've cut off a short piece of romx and I'm going to use the wires the three conductors inside for my pigtail so you're simply going to cut the Shaving off now you have access to your wires you can pull those out and what your left is is your your black your white neutral and your Earth ground today I'm going to be using wo lever clamps and all these are it's a mechanical clamp that you open up each side insert the wires in and then you can lock them down and they are reusable now wo and other brands make these in different configuration this is a one: one they also have a one to one on each side and that basically is a shorter profile but still connects your two wires and then they have all the way up to a five conductor wio now you can lock in five different conductors there and it'll tie them all together today I'll just be using the one onone wo 221 first I need to strip off the ends off my new pigtails and I'll go ahead and strip the other side just so it's ready for the switch and then I'm simply going to insert the wgo onto the bare connector and then through the clear plastic side you can do a quick inspection make sure it's seated properly and now I'll finish up with my neutral and Earth [Music] ground and as you can see my three wo pigtails are ready to connect to the short wires inside the switch Gang Box and now that our pigtails are made we're going to go ahead and just insert them onto the short wire side start out with our white [Music] neutral and now that all three are connected let's give them another tug those are solid not going to come apart they are reusable you just flip up the lever and you can take them right back off which makes easy access later on for future repairs there you have it folks the code says it has to extend past the sheathing or the Raceway at least 6 in and it has to extend from the Gang Box at least three these are extending out quite a bit almost 9 in there so plenty of cable length now now that our conductor length has been extended we can accordion it back carefully into the back of the box you want to be certain that you don't open up the wio clamps and I just like to cordion mine neatly into the back of the box so you just have a few in extending from the Gang Box now now since this is a three-way switch I need to go ahead and extend on my neutral and my ground over to the next switch box so I'll go ahead and use my green wire nut for the ground I've got a side by side wo connector here for the neutral so I'll pop that in that extends the neutral on out to the next switch I can accordion in that as well get it out of the way so what I'm left with is my neutral my hot and then my two traveler wires that'll hook up to the switch and head on to the other switch the next step is going to be to bend our J Hooks for the switch now that our hooks are installed we'll go ahead and hook up the switch first will be the Earth ground always install your hooks in a clockwise rotation that way it pulls them Tighter and doesn't loosen it next we'll hook up our hot wire now this is the hot wire coming from the power source goes onto the common terminal there and we'll go ahead and hook up our traveler wires put the red one on the left side doesn't really matter which side that it goes on on the switch you just want to keep it consistent switch to switch and now that all of our connections are made we'll go ahead and push the switch carefully into the Gang Box we'll accordion everything back into there go ahead and start it by hand and once it's started by hand I like to give it a good look to make sure that the ground wire is not coming in contact with any of the hot or traveler wires and that all looks good so we'll go ahead and continue fastening down the switch and of course we'll need to flip our breaker back on now that we've got our switch wire back in with the correct length to code wiring let's go ahead and test it out and there we have it so The Light Came back on our wires the correct length and everything works now in addition to the way I just showed you using the wigo connector there's also wire nuts you can use inline splicing pushin connectors inline crimmons so there are many ways that you can do this but I find that the neatest way that'll take up the least room is using the wo connector what's your preferred way to extend the wiring show me in those comments below once again 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Channel: Electrical U

Views: 5,368

Keywords: short wires, extend wires, diy electrical, switches, outlets, house wiring, electrical tips, fix short wires, wire extension, isolated power, diy tutorial, electrical safety, home improvement, wire lengthening, circuit wiring, electrical diy, extend electrical wires, fixing short wires, wiring solutions

Id: DqYA4uG4r1Y

Length: 7min 4sec (424 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 22 2024