The Easiest Way To Pull Large Gauge Electrical Wires Through Conduit

first and foremost guys make sure that you have the power turned off you do not want to be working in a live box so take precaution before you start this project next up you will need fish tape pullers in our case we ran into a snag which we're going to show you in the video we actually needed two fish tape pullers i will have these linked in the description box below the video where you guys can pick them up yourself save you a trip out to the store this is what's called a wire pulling lubricant and sometimes we have a harder pull you can use this we didn't need it for this particular pull but it is available at all of your home improvement stores electrical supply stores etc now we're fishing the fish tape fishing the fish tape through the conduit inserted here this is the first step here this is what we did before we just fished the fish tape and these things are handier than sliced bread so you fish it first and then you pull it or it's out of steel so it pushes pretty good and i oversized this conduit to make it easy to pull you can also get the conduit size off of tables that are readily available on the internet because depending on the type of insulation the number and size of wires will determine all right we're going to go outside here but we're going to show you exactly what we did here we have a fish tape puller that is coming out of the conduit out of the box here and as you can see this little latch is on here at the end of it coming down to our little hook here now what my dad is doing is the technique that he uses okay so in his hand is a number six and what he's actually doing is he's actually stripping the wire and then actually cutting off some of the wire so he's unbraiding it and then hooking it around so it's not completely thick two more wires to put on and i couldn't fit them all in there in this little eyelet here this is a technique that most electricians use as you can see here that's where he has cut off some of his wiring and we're going to put two more wires on here just like that and then we're going to tape it and this is the white these two will be the black 220 between them this is the neutral white coated that way and i'll also add a number eight ground all three of these wires are number sixes and um you'll be fed off of this power panel off of a 70 amp breaker you can you can look at the google national uh electric amperage tables to determine your size of wire that you need this is an inch and a quarter a pvc conduit it goes underneath this house and then outside it drops underneath the ground uh supposed to be eight in 18 inches burial comes up there's two what they call lbb lb fittings we'll show you that when we get outside so this is the technique he does he just strips the wire and then he'll cut off after he unbraids it like we just mentioned so you're able to hook all four wires through that hook and then we'll go ahead and tape it we'll show you that and pull it through and as you can see each one gets longer we're going to be staggering them so we do have to strip off more wire each one to be able to stagger them as this one up here is higher up than this one and then the next one will be lower and lower once again electrical taping the whole entire thing and pulling it through this insulation is thwm which is suitable for underground burial and conduit and it's really nice wire compared to the old insulations from years and years ago which are just tw which were thicker insulation and not nearly it's not water resistant or oil resistant like this stuff is this is really good insulation and it's been in use for years you can buy this wire at an electrical supply uh place which is where i bought this which is cheaper than home depot but if you only need a small amount then home depot is certainly more convenient access than or lowe's and maybe an electrical supply house but home depot wanted a dollar a foot for this and i got it for 81 cents at a um a foot that is um at electrical supply place here in the colorado springs area i'll put this one through and then we just have one more wire to go so it'll be per code for a ground wire you can see the size is slightly smaller than the number six it's more apparent if you look at the very end the size the way with electrical wiring the lower the number the larger diameter if you would of the wire itself now a few years ago they started using aluminum in many cases but i don't recommend aluminum because of what's called the expansion contraction coefficient electricity goes through the uh circuit it can heat up the points at which it's attached to such as your points in your electrical main service box or even at your receptacles and has been the cause of fire because of the gap then it develops at that point so always use copper and if you're buying a home you want to check and see what it's wired with because back in the vietnam war era when copper was in short supply they used a lot of aluminum in homes and that's what's caused problems through the years there are ways of mitigating that which are more than what we want to get to in this video but just be aware of problems now you can see this is smaller in diameter than that but still have to pull off i might add when i've had to pull um several even number 12 stranded wires i've had to do this as well if they're going into a junction box where a circuit application where i've had to pull more than two or three okay we're just about ready you see it's kind of sticking up here so what i do is i take my lineman's pliers and scrunch that back in the ways so it doesn't catch and now i'm going to take the whole thing i'll start up here there's some just regular electrical tape kind of do a spiral wrap down usually in the application as you go through the conduit the tape gets kind of torn up and since we're going to have three different poles one through the main house until it goes to what's called an lb which we'll show you when we get outside we'll pull it out there disconnect these uh this uh these wires from the fish tape you want to get down below they're just a little ways what's important otherwise you're going to have a mess to make a nice kind of thing up where it's uh you can grab onto it and then pull it off when you finish okay we're ready for the pull but i want to show you first you kind of want to get it started just by pushing it through now i'll have him go out and pull just a minute but i will be holding it like this as he pulls and we're going to have to stop the video because we need both hands to work during this process but i'll be putting it up like this so i can pull straight in and then pull my wire so he's going to pull only maybe a little over a foot no more than two feet at a time because i've got to pull these wires in and as you can see it's already catching around the corner there so i'm going to have to rig up something here to prevent it from getting stuck under the door so as you can see the wires have now come out and this is what we're using right here so i use my left hand or right hand and then this on top slides forward as it draws in the wire pulling it out as my dad is then feeding it from the other direction like we saw so these are great little machines for electrical pulling again the top portion goes forward as you can see there as i hold the bottom and so with my free hand not my camera phone hand this goes forward and wraps it back up in here as it's pulling it outside all right guys we're underneath the house now we're gonna show you where the wires are pulled from so our box is obviously right up here and we have the nice large conduit here as you can see here makes just pulling a lot easier it's over specked but it just makes pulling a lot easier as you can see here it's bracketed up right here and it's going all the way out that side of the guest house to the lb box now if that's how much wire you need to pull then your job is done but we actually have an lb right here with a waterproof cover and the lb is going underground and then going over to the next pull barn over there as you can see straight ahead right there there's the other lb going into the new garage pull barn where we want our final wire to end up so we actually had to undo the wire here because now we have to go over to that side of the lb push the wire back over here up here connecting the wires once again the same fashion but we've already stripped them so we're saving a step and then we're going to do the same thing again by pulling it down so it's a couple of different steps you can't just go straight from the box down through the lb because we need to have our fish tape puller to be able to come up and pull the wires back down we're going to pull all of what you need for the rest of the run including what has to go up into the box inside the garage out here and then pull in stages pull it all through here and then basically push it through there and then push it up to the box we'll show you that step as we go all right this might really help you out here if you run into a problem with pulling your wire we have a fish tape puller here we inserted over there coming up through here but we hit a snag somewhere down here we weren't sure what's going on so if you run into that problem you just can't get it up we actually then went this direction pushed it down it's come up over here and then we have another fish tape puller we're going to attach to that one to be able to then do our proper procedure so yes you will need two fish tape pullers if you run into that problem we just were fighting something down here it was sticking on and we're working smarter and not harder flexible fish tape here i just happen to have two of them because i was a electrical contractor back in another state but i'm going to attach them together and then use the first fish tape to pull this through and then use this new fish tape to um pull in my wire so that obviously will save you a lot of time instead of trying to fight that whatever that is maybe some glue in the piping we don't know as long as you have two of these you're back in business before you know it all right we've just literally copied everything we did on the first portion for our second pole through the lb connector so let's go ahead and pull it now just about ready for the finish to the pole and as it goes into the final pole i'm going to twist it just a little bit so that we go in straight down here at the bottom this point you can almost push them in and what you want to do is not be too tight enough for the box doesn't have to fight to get on that should be good then you got enough slack here if you have to pull something out for some reason these off because now we can do actually push pushing we won't need the fish tape so i'm going to snip these off we can actually push them through one at a time which makes it easier now you'll notice i've got more wire than what i needed but it's always better to have more wire because you don't want to end up with a short and then i would have to make connections in the lbs which is not recommended and may not be the code so this way i had plenty of wire i'm going to push them through here and then one of us will be out here to kind of guide it in leaving the same amount of slack as before and you can see it's very easy just to go straight through into the other lb push these through one at a time i'm pushing the last one in now and again leave a little bit of slack and that's it we'll put the covers on last and then we'll go inside now okay with this one i'm just going to wrap some tape around the three wire separately just push them up up through this conduit it should be ha ha knock on wood an easy relatively easy push without having to get the fish tape out and do all that stuff again so it won't hopefully catch on anything they're staggered again on this application so try to get your wires somewhat free from kinks so far so good there we go yay now the only problem is we have to keep these straight down here so as i pull up chris will kind of keep them straight let me get your thing down more like this makes it easier to pull on me now we can do one at a time as we get close which i think is we're there let's see i think i'll do the white wire first so i'll pull it separately not jam it in but keep a little bit of slack like always now i'm going to do one of the blacks another black and the last black okay we have pulled in all of our wire all three poles and a good estimation as we can see we do have about you know six feet left over but better to have more than less that's right okay this is the final hookup in the panel that services the subpanel we just pulled the wire in as you can see all four wires coming up here the white neutral goes to the white neutral bus bar the green ground with the tape on it now goes to a separate ground bus bar this is again as a sub panel on this end two if this was the main service and you needed the extra bus bars you would run another ground wire from here to the main grounding bar but we didn't need to do that here actually i did anyway it's right here uh just to make sure those two are connected then um we put in the new 70 amp breaker and uh we'll leave that off but it goes here i'll have to take out two more notches and we'll show you the final installation once all that is done okay we pulled out two more notches on the top here slipped right over obviously put back in your screws and then go ahead and hit your main principle and turn your juice back on which we are hot now and these ones are off currently right now but go ahead and remember to hit those as well and since this is a guest house and i've got the hot electric hot water heater off i've got a weight stein on here with a note here do not turn that breaker on until hot water heater is full of water otherwise you'll burn out the hot water heater which is right here all right guys well thanks so much for watching if you appreciated the video hit that thumbs up and subscribe we got some more electrical check out our other video about sub paneling and we'll wire that one put in a little bit more details with installation of the breakers etc so also check out the channel for that again look in the description box below we'll have a couple of these things linked up take care the party stop guys hit one of these videos continue to watch we'll see you soon [Music] you

Channel: TipsNNTricks

Views: 305,599

Keywords: The Easiest way to pull large electrical wires through conduit, running wires, wires, wire, fish tape puller, what is a fish tape puller, using a fish tape puller, how to pull electrical wires through conduit, pulling wires through conduit, the easiest way to pull large gauge wires through conduit, TipsNNtricks, electrical wires through conduit, how to pull large gauge electrical wires, electrical wires, how to wire a house, wiring a house, house projects, diy house projects, diy

Id: SsdC6nZXhdg

Length: 17min 39sec (1059 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 09 2021