Jeff's Top Electrical Hacks for Your Home

hey it's jeff from home renovation here today we're talking about electrical hacks two words probably shouldn't use together but listen the deal is this if you ever been to the harbor store they got an entire row dedicated to little shelf spots this big with hundreds and hundreds of products in there and if you're an average homeowner you take one look at that and go well that's a bunch of stuff i'll know nothing about for the rest of my life and you move on but there is some really great stuff in that aisle that you would probably love to have on your job site so what i'm going to do in this video is share with you some of my favorite tips and tricks that i learned from that aisle over the years that you can implement at home and it'll make your life a lot easier okay first thing we're going to talk about extension cords you can't go cheap all right if you are using power tools that are designed to be used at 15 amps and you don't buy a 14 gauge wire you are selling yourself short on your tools if you buy yourself a 16 gauge wire which is a traditional cheap extension cord you're going to plug that in your tool is going to work at half of its performance you're really ripping yourself off now good extension cords are going to cost a little bit of money all right it's almost two bucks a foot for a good cord and at the end of the day i think they're worth it one a good cord like this is going to be very very flexible all right we're gonna see it's a three prong plug and it even lights up when there's power in it which is brilliant because how many times have you gone to use a tool and it's not powered and you check well it's plugged in this light will actually shine and you'll know you have this end plugged in properly most of the time there's nothing wrong with the tool just the thing got pulled out of the wall so handy dandy little gadget i recommend you have one of those and there's a few other things you can do with the plug like this that makes your life simple let's say for instance you want to paint a room now there are a lot of houses in this world that did the wiring kind of weird back in the 60s and 70s they bring the power to the room go to the light switch and then they use a three wire a red of black and a white and they'd go to all the wall plugs around the room and the top part of that plug was wired so that if you turn the light switch on your lamps would light up and the lighting in the room was switched to lamps there was no overhead lights if you've got a room like that and you want to paint it's maddening because you can't see anything and you don't have lamps and cords hanging around all over the place right so we got an option right here option number one this is a little wall plug costs about a buck and you can stick that in a wall socket guess what that's right put a light bulb in it how awesome is that instant light you can put one on each side and now this light bulb here while i'm talking about light bulbs is an incandescent light bulb yes they still sell this you know why because it's what they call i'll give you the english side rough service bulb you can still buy this light bulb in that electrical aisle it doesn't break it's extremely strong and what happens with this is this bulb is a hundred watts it is crazy bright and it will help you to do all of your drywall touch ups and all of your repairs on your walls while you're painting and you'll see every single flaw in the room and if you can patch it perfect then you can paint it perfect but you're going to need to buy this little gizmo and this little cool light bulb here and that's going to be the key to success the other option you have is of course you have let's say a light fixture in the room and you don't have any power you can buy this little gizmo okay this is an extension again you can throw your light bulb in here and then you can twist that in your little light fixture and now you've got a receptacle you can add power to a place where you didn't have access to it before that can come in really handy too because in the middle construction sometimes one of the circuits are out or something like that and this little gizmo is a lifesaver it's also a great way to bring power out to the backyard you can plug this into your flood lamp or into a post light and give yourself the ability to put in an extension cord and hook up your weed whacker to it or something worth a couple of bucks great gizmo another great thing you can do is you can take this let's say you want to go work up in your attic all right or in the top of the garage or some other place where they don't have any lights you can plug this into your extension cord throw in 100 watt rough surface bulb and just toss it over the rafters crazy i know but 100 watt light bulb in an attic will light up the whole room like it's your living room that is money in the bank that makes life really simple you don't have to wear a headlamp or walk around with some sort of a you know 180 dollar flashlight or something just buy a five dollar bulb and a one dollar thing is sticking on an extension cord you're good to go now what happens if you have an extension cord and the ends get cut off you have an accident you cut through your cord not a problem you can fix your cord now if you're in a trade and you're working on a work site you're not allowed to do this because the rules for safety in our country and apparently they won't let you fix your cord you have to buy a brand new one because your cord have to have stickers on them these stickers indicate to an inspector that the cord is still in manufactured condition but as a homeowner we can break all the rules what you can do is you can take your cord cut back the wire there you go you got a ground you got your hot and you got your neutral all right you close that back up around your wire throw your screw in boom repair extension cord that's a 50 extension cord folks that is a dollar 25. you tell me which way you would rather go because that's money in the bank another option you might need is what we call the pigtail that's another light socket okay regular size bulb comes with black and white ends all right you just pull those tabs off a lot of people have got a center room light we're going to call it it's just a one little round box in the middle of the room and if you're painting your ceiling you have to remove the light fixture to paint right duh so you take the light fixture off you can take one of these they're a little over buck you twist the black and the white together grab yourself a couple of these blue moretz now maybe i'll just demonstrate real quick if you're not familiar with this sort of thing electrical work is not difficult you take your two wires together now in this case you're going to put the black to the black and the white to the white but for the purpose of the demonstration i'll just show you how to connect wire two quick little twists like that you take your blue cap and you set it on and you just go like this until your fingers can't tighten anymore now you got a completed circuit guaranteed to work you can hang that with that rough surface bulb for instance just a few bucks and you can have the room lit up like christmas and you can make sure that you do an awesome job on your paint the next round of gizmos we're going to get into are a little bit more if you're building or making adjustments to your house or adding circuits or moving things around you know it's uh it's a little confusing most people are familiar with a regular receptacle or a single light switch but if we go back and let's say we're doing a major renovation let's start from the very beginning if you're in a home where you need a vapor barrier you can actually attach this to a stud and then you can cut a little hole run your wire in it and put your box inside this is the vapor well okay and then when you run your plastic you simply cut the hole open and now you've got a continuous vapor barrier you just use a little bit of that acoustic caulking around and squish it all together done the only other way to do a really good vapor barrier is take a bunch of plastic wrap it stick it and then you got to cut the plastic pull it all out it's all wrinkly you got to tape it all up takes forever but if you use one of these it's clean and simple and fast and it might be a lot easier for you to just run a couple of plugs on your outside wall using this system there you go now one of the most popular questions we get on the channel is about how to deal with like a stucco ceiling or a stipple ceiling it's been painted or it's asbestos and it's just a nightmare to try to make the ceiling smooth which is all the rage right everybody wants a nice smooth ceiling what you can do is you can watch our video we'll put a card up here it's our drywall tips and tricks video and i demonstrate real quickly how to cover over your drywall with another layer of drywall problem is is all of your octagon boxes and your ceiling where your light is they're not going to be long enough now so when you go to put your light fixture up the screws aren't going to make it one of the ways you can solve that problem instead of trying to shop for the right screws is you can buy one of these all right this is what's called a box extender now you see the little tab here all you do is if the box is here you take your box extender and you slide it over and you tighten the original screws down and it extends in another half inch okay now you can buy these in one and a half inch depth as well and you can use any variation of combinations of all these you're going to extend the box two feet if you want to as long as the wire is long enough that you can access it you can keep adding extensions they are expensive but they do solve a problem in a situation like i was describing with the ceiling you can extend the box and make sure that you're going to pass your inspections that's brilliant oh and while we got the box out let's show you this okay i really should have brought my knife one other thing you might run into when you're doing your remodeling is you're going to be finished with a box that's in the ceiling now one of the things we can't do when we're renovating is we're not allowed to leave electrical buried in the ceiling you've got to have access to it and you're going to find that in certain situations you're like i wish the box was just gone i don't want to hang a light there you can do this you can hang a plate you can paint this plate the same color as the ceiling if necessary because it comes shiny you can cover it in flat ceiling paint but here's what i wanted to show you these boxes the holes line up with the holes that are in that octagon plate this is all very standard sizing so when you put it over top your octagon okay even if you need more space because you added sealing to it look how long that screw is that'll go from the box through the new drywall right into that no problem this covers up the hole and that officially can be a junction box still and that's the key sometimes you'll have a junction of wires in there and you've got to have access to it according to code so by using something like this you can get a nice clean finished look and not have to have an ugly box or stuff it in the ceiling alrighty now other tips and tricks let's go with this the low voltage trick seems like everybody nowadays is putting low voltage wiring throughout the house i'm thinking back i remember when cat 3 and cat 4 were going in and i've had people over the years renovate their entire house from one category to every corner of the house thinking oh technology is advancing so fast soon we'll be able to communicate with all of our devices in the house with cat three wire and what happened but the same time that they came up with that everything went wireless oh well so much for all that wiring anyway there still are some advantages to this system you can still use that category 5 wire to run security systems for instance or video feeds or all kinds of other wonderful things and if you want to have it or you're running good old-fashioned cable tv or a phone line i know not too many of us with those anymore but you know what it's not a bad idea to have at least one line landline in a house especially if you live in the country because even when the power goes out the phone will still work if you buy an old phone now here we go this is a low voltage box what you do is you put it on the drywall trace the box out okay around these little screws and then you would cut that with a drywall saw all right piece of cake now you've got a hole in your wall you take this tab and you bend it over all right and it actually wraps around the drywall and then the screw goes through the hole and then through the back side and then it actually pinches together for a good bond and you do that on the top and the bottom okay and you've got what we call a low voltage box now low voltage means it's not hooked up to the 15 amps of the house is hooked up to a another device system like a sound system or a security system it doesn't run a lot of power and there's no risk of electrocution in those scenarios you're allowed to just cut a hole put this on and then these holes line up with any of the cover plate options that you have out there these are also great if you're going to mount a tv on a wall and you've got your receiver and your box and everything down on a table you can punch a hole like this in the drywall behind your receiver and one behind the tv and run all your cables in the wall and one of the finished plates actually comes with a slit in the middle with all this little black hairy foam stuff okay and so you can push your wire through the foam and it keeps it nice and sealed up and that is a great way to make a modification to a room to give yourself a brand new modern look in an old house this next box is actually going to be used on this island because i still have to run two outlets on the island because i have to be up to code now what you do with this and i know this sounds almost crazy but you can cut the hole for the island okay i'm going to just draw it right here for you you measure a hole to cut just behind the screws okay boom boom boom boom you can cut that out you can use a drill and a jigsaw all right and then now i'm going to have a hole in my island and what this box allows me to do is collapse and i can actually feed it through the hole all right and then when i tighten the screws up you see how how low that gets i just need to have this edge of the box grab maybe a millimeter like a sixteenth of an inch on each side okay and then i've actually got that box fixed to whatever thickness the panel is if you have three quarter or five eighths or half inch it doesn't matter this adjusts for everything and these are designed by the the backs being cut off these corners being cut off are designed so that you can set it on the front of the panel and then rock it in to place all right and then tighten them up now this is a brilliant little gizmo awesome for islands and hard to reach places probably one of the most underused least respected and most valuable boxes on the whole planet because if you have an island and you do it any other way you're going to make a mess of everything and if you cut the hole too big there's nothing for anything to grab onto and then you're going to be drilling holes and trying to throw screws into the side of something else in your island it's just a mess so take your time cut the hole a little bit shorter than the total width of the panel here and then you will have great success doing all your island plugs next thing you're going to want to buy in that electrical aisle is this all right everybody on the planet should own a roll of this this is just good old-fashioned electrical tape and you know what just for the heck of it give this video a thumbs up if you've ever seen me one of my videos with an electrical tape band-aid that's right i don't use this very often doing electrical work but i love to have a roll of this in the toolbox because everybody should have a roll of this band-aid i don't care how bad your injury is you could almost turn this into a tourniquet if you needed to and stretch it on real tight to stop blood from blowing if you got a really bad cut but this is awesome because when you get to the hospital they always want to check you out before you actually get in and you can undo the tape relatively easy and then seal it back up again show me another band-aid that does that so next product i'm going to show you um it's been on the market a long time and very underused but it's kind of cool this little switch here is designed to go in the door assembly all right now this takes a take some special tools you're going to have to have a kind of cut out tool that you can cut into the door jamb to set this and then run the wire to it this is a really freaking awesome tool what this is and i know it's going to blow your mind it's a switch for your door so when you open your door it's released and the light turns on in the closet how cool is that now you can don't have to have a regular switch you just walk in you open a door the light turns on brilliant front hulls master bedroom closets all that kind of stuff if you want to control the switch with the action of the door you can use that nowadays you can also buy motion sensor lights i know the world's changing so fast there are so many options but if you want to keep things cheap and cost effective having a switch like that gives you just a touch of class and it's a relatively low price now as far as that's concerned let me show you one of the coolest plugs on the market this is for everybody who wants to mount a tv on the wall and you want to mount it flush this is a receptacle okay how awesome is that it actually goes in into the box all right this is also really good if you want to hang a picture and put a light on it that's a little old 80s technique but these are great options um behind sofas and other furniture it gives you a lot more room to play with because you can have the plug in the hole and the cord draping just out in front of it okay these are awesome they're actually really cost effective they're not much much more than a regular receptacle and you don't need a cover plate all comes in one this is one of these things you can buy if you have a house and you got one of those five by seven bathrooms this might be the solution for you because you have one switch and the original switch used to wire the fan and a light here and a light there in this scenario you're able to bring in the power and split it up through three different feeds so one power supply three different feeds three different switches okay the shower light the vanity light and the bathroom fan can all you don't have to change the power supply in that situation just the fixture ah so you can use existing power because those those houses are wired different today we run all the plugs on one we run all the lights on another and then the gfi on another circuit but this in an old situation can give you the flexibility to have one power supply that you have now and turn it into having control over three different functions that is a stellar thing and i think there's a lot of people out there who are renovating their old houses who would love to have that kind of flexibility and not have to rewire the whole house just to get it done next thing i want to talk about tools all right now y'all everyone needs a side cutter and this is awesome because it's pointed and it gives you a lot of flexibility and then you need a wire stripper it has a different gauge of wire on here so that you can take the sheathing and remove it it works relatively simple and if you want to see it in operation we have a link up here i wired my whole bathroom and so you can click the link but here's a tool from crescent it's a two in one and this is a handy little tool all right and you can go check out the video description and we'll have a link to our international tools down there which is an affiliate link so you shop there you help support our channel that'd be appreciated but the point of this is this tool can give you everything in one so that you don't have to have a bunch of different tools hanging around it's kind of awesome i enjoyed this a lot actually so cheers crescent they sent this to me for free full disclosure but i actually enjoyed using it so great gift now finishing plates i found so many people have made this mistake not in residential i'm talking like new home construction all right they make a hole that is almost the same size as the plate and then when they put out all together the plate sticks on like this and there's these spots these corners these little ugly areas that you can see the hole around the plate okay and part of that's because the box are installed twisted or the hole was cut on a bit of an angle and it's just not pretty right when you can see that nasty gap and most people don't know about this because you never wander down that aisle with 8 000 things on the shelf it's called and we used to call it a king size plate it's this one this one's called a uh a larger a 3 8 now watch this and you can see how big this is and what how much mercy this covers bam look at the extra space you got on that okay if you're somebody that you hung all your drywall and you use the drywall knife to cut around where the boxes were gonna be and then you hung the drywall you probably end up with a gap like that now you can use expansion foam and tape and drywall mud and three coats and sanding and but if you're at the end of the job and you're putting all your finishes on and that's when you find that you have a problem this is the solution this is like a buck you go to the store you buy this the job's done and if you have to you can change three or four plugs in the same room to the same size so they all look the same it's just a couple bucks but the job's still done okay it's perfectly acceptable just use a larger plate cover your mess if you're doing tile in your kitchen larger plate because when you trim around the screws it's a really tight area and you might not have the best looking tile cut especially if you're using glass you'll get scratches and stuff use a large size plate and it'll cover all of those mistakes and make you look like a pro all right this is my last little gizmo i'm going to show it to you because this is one of the coolest inventions in the world i just wish to make it easier to open all right we did a video um and we'll throw the link up here about how to do subway tile and i got a lot of slack in that video people were calling me out oh you didn't grind around the screw let me draw this up so i had a box right and that's like this and then you've got your receptacles right okay and then that's on a little thing like this and then it's got these little tabs on it with the holes and there's a little hole right here okay the same thing down here there's a hole right here okay and this is where the screw from the plate goes and when i cut my tile i cut this line right here and these people are saying how you can't put your cover plate on because you didn't grind a hole for that screw in your tile okay now listen if you live in the market where you're using glass and you try to grind that you're gonna get an ugly mess on your tile all around can you even see the screw coming out the back side just barely eh this screw is designed to be attached with a single thread okay right into this and if you look at these boxes these switches these little holes are actually raised off the wall so i can actually attach this into this pulled tight up against tile and i don't need to cut around it all right and once i've screwed that on this actually snaps in place now if you're in a kitchen and you've got a backsplash tile and you've got a snap-on cover it is even easier to keep that kitchen clean it's brilliant two reasons if things aren't perfectly aligned you can actually back out the screw a little bit give you a little more room snap it on if your tiles are textured and they're and they're making it so that nothing's closing up properly you can make those adjustments and snap it on but you can always clean it off and you can always remove these things and you don't have to spend all day long fussing around with the grinder trying to make that screw hole perfect which is a huge waste of time okay so buy snap-on plugs and covers they even sell a snap-on situation where the plug is already made to receive the cover and snap right onto it you don't have to use this bracket all right so there's lots of options out there feel free to explore the aisle okay and if you have yet to subscribe to our channel huh hit the button join our community all right we're here to help if you've got questions throw them in the comments section and if you'd like to see some of the other videos we've done on our bench series that give a lot of explanation to things you may not have thought about before but now that you've watched the video you're so glad you took the time because you'll learn some things right click the link up here you can follow along our whole bench series a to z's on just about every little knick-knack in the house that'll make life a lot easier as you renovate thanks for joining us we hope you have a successful renovation and if you need help consider joining our membership program you can send us pictures and emails and we can be there to help you out cheers

Channel: Home RenoVision DIY

Views: 257,100

Rating: 4.9277344 out of 5

Keywords: homerenovision, renovision, do it yourself, diy, tips, home renovision diy, jeff thorman, electrical hacks, diy home electrical hacks, home electrical hacks, useful things, life hacks, tricks, diy projects, electricity, diy home renovation, diy home reno, diy home remodel, home electrical 101, home electrical basics, basic home electrical hacks, diy home electrical easy, diy home electrical advice, diy home electrical simple

Id: zBNSM5BqMqs

Length: 25min 29sec (1529 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 29 2020