Upgrading Two Prong to Three Prong Outlets - Don't Rewire Your House?

hey everyone mark from the top homeowner and today we're going to talk a little bit about gfci outlets and the practice of replacing two-prong outlets with the gfci outlet in order to not have to rewire a house we're going to talk about the pros and cons of doing this and whether or not it's safe and legal all right so in large part this is a follow-up video to a previous video i had done an old house where we had renovated the upstairs it was a two-story house with a full basement we had a lot of older two-prong outlets in the house and we wanted to upgrade them to a prong outlet without having to rewire the entire house because on a three-story house basically going all the way from the basement all the way up to the second floor on that size of a house having to rewire that you'd have to tear out drywall and you'd have a significant expense when it comes to rewiring and all the repair work that would be involved so in order to avoid that we ended up going with a different solution which was replacing the two prong outlets with the gfci outlet so just to be sure we're clear about what we're talking about here this is a modern day ungrounded outlet so you can see here there's no ground plug no third plug here to receive a ground this is a polarized outlet which means that one side is smaller than the other small is always going to be the hot side but other than that there's no ground so this is a problem for modern day equipment when it comes to things like computers and appliances they need a ground in order to be able to function and function safely in order to fix that problem typically what you have to do is to rewire your entire house another option that you have is to replace this with one of these which is a gfci outlet now the reason why this works and this is something that not very many people talk about is because on this you don't have to have a ground wire in order for a gfci receptacle to work and the reason is because there is electronics inside of this that monitors the difference between the amount of electricity coming out of the hot side and the amount of electricity coming into the neutral side these two things should be the same or very close to the same if they're not something is wrong essentially so the circuitry is designed to detect this and it's designed to shut this off inside of this receptacle whether or not there's a ground present on my previous video there were a lot of questions about how this works does it work should it work should you do this should you not do this is it legal so i'm going to answer your top questions one by one all right so question number one is this the same thing as having a ground wire installed and the answer is simply no it's not also if you have something that requires uh ground if it's sensitive electronics for example uh that it needs to have a ground in order to make sure it functions uh properly then you need to make sure you're plugging this that device into a grounded outlet if this isn't the same thing as having a ground then why do this in the first place so what typically happens is if you have a house that only has the two-prong receptacles and you have things that have three prongs that need to be plugged in a lot of times what people will do is they'll actually install one of these or they'll use one of these this is an adapter that you can use to plug in a three-prong plug into this side and then this plugs into a two-prong receptacle this is okay but i'd rather have a gfci outlet to provide a little bit more protection rather than just rely on this adapter also with these adapters they have this little um this little area here that allows you to take the faceplate screw and screw this in place and all that's designed to do is to hold this adapter in place so it doesn't fall out a lot of people confuse that because it's actually close to the grounded plug they confuse that and they think that that provides the ground but it doesn't the other thing i've seen people do is they'll take that third prong that grounded prong and they'll actually cut it off or they'll remove it completely which is also a bad practice so i'd rather have i'd much rather have the gfci outlet in place providing some protection than using an adapter like this probably the biggest question about this is whether or not this is actually legal is this something legal that you can do and the answer is most likely and the reason i say most likely is because per the nec code this is an acceptable practice and i'll reference the section where that is listed in the latest edition of the nec at the time of this recording which is the 2020 edition but the reason why it may not be acceptable is if you have local codes in your area that don't allow for it now you always want to make sure when you're doing any kind of electrical work that you're not all only following the national codes but also the local codes in your area also these receptacles can protect not only uh this the location where this is installed but these can also protect any other receptacles that are attached to it in the circuit um in my previous video i referenced placing this as the first outlet air receptacle in the room and that's not exactly true in my case it was that was actually the first receptacle on the circuit um but if you're going to install this in your house you want to make sure that you put the gfci receptacle in the first location on the circuit otherwise what you're going to end up doing is you're going to have multiple gfci receptacles on a single circuit which isn't really a problem as it's concerned to safety but it is kind of annoying if you end up tripping one you might think well why is the gfci receptacle here not have power well it's actually because it's on another gfci receptacle and another location in the house it gets really confusing really quick another question that came up is why not use gfci breakers and uh they do make gfci breakers and that is absolutely an option that you can use if you have this situation the reason why we didn't do that this in our house is because the electrical panel that was installed in this house this is a house that was built in the 60s the electrical panel simply wouldn't accept a gfci uh breaker and so we would have had to have the complete panel redone which would have been about a four to five thousand dollar expense uh in and of itself so we chose not to go that way when you install this something that i didn't cover in that video is that you need to make sure you have placed a sticker on the front of the receptacle that says no ground now these typically come in the box with a gfci receptacle so you need to put that sticker on not only the gfci receptacle that you installed but also any of the other receptacles in that circuit that that gfci receptacle is protecting some other comments were that if you install this gfci receptacle it's still going to show an open ground and that is absolutely 100 true um this isn't going to give you a true ground this is just a way to help protect that receptacle and the other receptacles that are in that circuit um and it's better than not having anything in place obviously rewiring your house is the best option but sometimes that's not the most practical solution and so this is something that you can do instead of that another comment we received was about uh not installing the wire in the back of their receptacle and to be honest with you i disagree with that and i disagree with that for a couple reasons one is because i've never seen a gfci outlet have a backstab or a push in option now i'm going to explain what that is here on a typical receptacle and this is on a residential receptacle you've got this option to be able to push wires in the back here in order to wire it and i won't go into the details of why that exists but just know that these wires are held on with a tiny clip inside and they can loosen up over time so i would not recommend using that but i will say on a gfci receptacle and on commercial grade receptacles the back wiring option is actually clamp based so you stick the wire in from the back and it goes underneath this clamp and then you use the side terminal screw to tighten the wire down there's absolutely no problem with this if you have any comments about that why you think that's not acceptable i'd love to hear from you so leave me a comment below and last but not least there was a safety comment that we had on the video that talked about making sure that when we were trying to figure out where the line was coming into the into the outlet box which wires were hot basically that i had the power back on and i didn't have anything protecting the wires and that is absolutely true i should have had wire nuts on the end so i appreciate the comments that i got about that if you do that in your own house make sure you have wire nuts on make sure you have everything protected and as safe as possible when you're working with electricity and also it kind of goes without saying but if you're not comfortable with working with electricity you probably shouldn't be doing this job i would highly recommend you consult a licensed electrician and have them take care of this for you and maybe give you some additional options that you might not be thinking about depending on what your situation is with your house if you're interested in the other videos i have on gfci receptacles i'll have those at the end here i've got another one that talks about how to wire a gfci receptacle that goes into a little bit more depth and also the original video that talks about replacing the two prong receptacles with gfci so i encourage you to check both of those out thanks for watching this video i hope you found it helpful please like and subscribe if you like to stay tuned to all the tips and tricks we have at the top homeowner thanks for watching we will see you in the next one

Channel: Top Homeowner

Views: 83,346

Keywords: gfci 2 wire no ground, gfci 2 wire, gfci no ground, gfci no gound wire, install gfci no ground wire, how to install gfci outlet with 2 wires, how to install gfci no ground, two prong receptacle, two prong receptacles, replace your old two prong receptacle, rewire house, rewire home, rewire house electrical, two prong to three prong outlet, how to ground an outlet without a ground wire, top homeowner, tophomeowner, gfci, diy, ungrounded outlets

Id: 3AXcRsAOLPk

Length: 8min 55sec (535 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 02 2021