The BIGGEST Mistakes DIYers Don't Know They Are Making When Installing Metal Electrical Boxes

so there's a very common electrical project out there where I see plenty of mistakes that are being made that can actually be very dangerous and I'm seeing it done by diy-ers a lot I'm seeing some other videos out there and yes in some of my renovation projects some of the work that I've uncovered I've also seen where a pro in the past has done it incorrectly as well and the project that I'm referring to is when installing these metal electrical boxes now this one is for indoor use this is a more standard 4x4 box and of course there's other variations of this so I'm going to show you a few of the most common mistakes that are being made and then also how to fix them or just avoid them all together so let's go ahead and Jump Right In let's go all right so I've got a mock box made up here of some of the most common mistakes I see being made when installing these metal electrical boxes and then I also have an extra one thrown in there because it's just such a common mistake that I see being made I figured I'd touch on it so take a moment look at this box see if you can see all the mistakes that are being made in in this electrical box all right so probably the most obvious one that you saw being wrong was probably this wire that's going into this metal box as you can see there's no strain relief there's no clamp on it that's going to hold this wire from being able to be pulled and possibly even pulled out of the box so if I pull on this as you can see I'm putting strain on the wiring that's in the box and I'm pulling all of it and over time that could really cause a problem as far as one of these wires possibly coming out of the wire nut or if you're using a Wago if these were not installed properly you could end up pulling one of the wires out of one of the splicing devices and of course if you have a loose hot wire in a box like this that could spell big trouble there could be arcing you could have a fire amongst a bunch of other problems that could happen so what should be used there is one of these clamp connectors right here it goes in through the box it gets nutted down and then you tighten down the clamp onto the wire which then serves basically as a vice to hold that wire in place so it can't be pulled out and this is what one of those looks like up close as you can see here is the clamping section that as the wire goes through it gets pulled down you tighten it down with a screwdriver and then there's also this lock nut that once you push this up into the box through one of The Knockouts once it's in there then you just put this in on top and then you tighten it down up against the box like so now another very common device that's used in order to clamp the wires down is this NM connector right here and how this works is this will go into the box and then once it's in the box you can feed your Romex in through this way here and once it comes in through that it can't be pulled out so let me demonstrate that real quick on this box so then this NM connector just goes right into the hole like so and it pops into place like that so then you can take your new Romex and just run it through that slot right there goes into the box like so and you feed it in as much as you want then when you go to pull it out it's not going to pull out so this could be another good option especially for Di wires I personally like to use the metal clamps myself I think that they provide the most safety also they can be reused whereas with these plastic NM connectors they're more of a one-time use so with that being said if you're finding value in this or you find it to be helpful and informative if you could do me a huge favor hit that thumbs up button right down below it really does help the video out to spread out to more people and hopefully be able to help them out as well I really appreciate it let's get back into it so now moving on to the next most common mistake that I see being made and that comes down to these ground wires right here now in a plastic box like this one the way I have my ground wires here is perfectly fine I've got all my ground wires twisted up together underneath of a wire nut everything's good to go so when it comes to one of these plastic boxes but one of those plastic boxes can't conduct electricity a metal box can so one of the big hazards that can come from my ground wires being like this and a metal box is if one of my line wires that has power flowing through it comes loose whether it's out of this or out of a wire nut whatever it's being connected to if it comes loose and it makes contact with the wall of this metal box well now this entire box is energized and if you go to touch it you're going to get shocked or possibly electrocuted depending on the power that's being contained within the box and this is probably the mistake that I see being done the most so in order to protect this what would need to happen is this box needs to be bonded it needs to be grounded as well so instead of all these ground wires just being all together isolated from the box what actually also needs to happen is if you see this hole right here on this little Hill or this hump here this is actually where a ground wire should be connected to this box box to then bound it to all of the other ground wires so in the event of an energized wire going up against the electrical box it'll ground itself out and if you look up here in the hole I don't know if you can see it or not but it's actually threaded and that's where a ground screw actually needs to go and you can't just use any screw you have to actually use one of these green ground screws and you can find these pretty much anywhere you can find them in as small a packs as these here and of course I have links for all this down in the description down below but it has to be one of these green ground screws it can't just be any screw and almost none of these metal boxes actually come with the grounding screws already in them so of course you have to buy that pack whereas with the weatherproof boxes they almost always already have the grounding screw or grounding screws already in them depending on the box so what should have been done and how I'm going to correct this is I'm going to go ahead and remove this wire nut from the ground wires then I would need to make up another ground wire now this I just pulled from some scrap Romex that I had laying around so those are really easy to make up now they do also make an insulated green grounding wire that you can buy at a store and I think it also comes with the grounding screw so it's already made up and in some applications you may actually have to use that being as that it's insulated so I just try to make sure that I'm using the correct grounding device for my particular application so then in order to make my Loop to go around this grounding screw I'll just take my bare copper wire and my wire strippers put it in through one of these holes here on the side in order to make my Loop all right so now I've got my J hook made up so then what I like to do wrap that J hook around the grounding screw in a clockwise Direction like so and then I'll just take my wire strippers or my lineman pliers and I'll just try to tighten that Loop up around that screw so it can't just fall out and it's got a nice Bond up against the screw then I'll take the grounding screw and put it in through the threaded portion that I showed you earlier up on this metal bump in the box and then I'll just tighten it down into place here I personally like to pre-twist all my wires that's what I was taught but in one of my previous videos I learned through the comment section that some of you do not like to pre-twist at all you just rely on the wire nut which According to some of the main wire nut manufacturers they do not require you to pre-twist so as long as it's installed correctly that's really all that matters I just personally think that pre-twisting forms a better joint and then of course there are also those of you that only use juegos which then pre-twisting doesn't matter to you so for the most part those are the two biggest mistakes I see being made when installing these metal boxes but I threw in another mistake into this box that doesn't necessarily have to do with the metal box itself it's just such a common mistake that I see being done when installing this kind of application and that has to do over here with where this Wago is I don't know if you spotted it at the beginning of the video but like I said I've got this all hooked up to be able to install an outlet to this so I've got some pigtails running and if you look at these wires that are coming out of this Wago you'll see two number twelves and this one is quite a bit smaller this is actually a number 14. this is a mistake that I see being made pretty regularly when people are using jumpers or connecting wires is they won't use the proper gauge so it doesn't do any good to have number 12 that's capable of carrying up to 20 amps and then installing a 14 gauge wire where depending especially on what you put here as far as a receptacle goes if you pull too much amperage now all of a sudden you've got a fire hazard so what should actually be here is I'll remove this number 14. I'll install this number 12 into the Wago or if you're using wire nuts obviously you do them up like I did here with the ground and the neutral all right so now for the most part this is roughed in and ready for an outlet and a cover to be installed on it of course if I was going to be roughing this in it wouldn't look like this I just have everything separated so that you can see it more clearly and I also wouldn't be using different kinds of splicing devices I just pick one or the other I just showed you using a wire nut and away go in this case just to show that they can both be used in this application now of course there's a bunch of other techniques when doing projects like this and I've done a bunch of them in the past I'm going to post some videos right over here that you can click on that go over some of that and if you're interested in just DIY type projects for around the house you can go to my channel and I've got a bunch of other content there as well so hopefully you found this video be helpful and informative and maybe showed you some better practices if you did please let me know by giving the video a thumbs up and of course if you have any questions or comments at all you can leave those down in the comment section and I'll catch you all in the next one see ya

Channel: How To Home

Views: 998,241

Keywords: Biggest Electrical Mistakes, Biggest Mistakes Made When Installing a Metal Electrical Box, Installing a Metal Electrical Box, Installing an Electrical Box, How To, How to install an electrical box

Id: LrZEz7SOwW0

Length: 9min 36sec (576 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 03 2022