What Is A Neutral Wire?

hi James with the one-hour smart home comm and today we are going to explain to you what is a neutral wire or what a neutral wire does so we've got a whole wiring diagram of how a neutral wire and how your electrical system in your house typically works and we're gonna explain that to you so a neutral wire at its most basic level is a wire that is the return path for current it is essentially neutral so voltage typically in a house is a hundred and twenty volts a neutral wire when there's no power going through this system is zero it is the path back to zero volts or the path back to a potential of zero it's neutral so what you typically have for a neutral wire and an electrical system is first thing you've got your power coming in from the utility grid and on that a typical house is gonna have two 120 volt legs right here in here and a neutral wire and so we showed that 220 volt legs coming in and the blue is the neutral wire black is the hot or 120 volt power coming in and what we've done is just so if you want to follow along the flow of power or current through the electrical system you can do so by following these orange arrows so like we said a neutral wire is a return path for current and a lot of you might be watching this because you don't have a neutral wire in your switch box and you want to add smart switches that's the case click on one of the other videos below that explains how you can install Smart Switches without a neutral wire however this is just going to be explaining electrical systems and what a neutral wire is in what a neutral wire does so once it the power or the voltage gets to the electrical panel you just keep following this hot wire okay and hot is the terminology used for the wire that has live 120 volts on it or live power on it doesn't have to be 120 volts but in the context of a home most homes are 120 volts here in America other countries you may have other voltages so you follow this path Hotwire the electrical current does meet it in the orange is flowing down here and typically the first thing that you encounter in an electrical circuit is an outlet okay in electrical circuits you're gonna have a couple of them throughout your house you may have three or four dozen or 50 depends on the size of your house but an electrical circuit is basically one loop one continuous loop of electrical wiring that goes out through the hot wire to whatever devices you're powering or whatever lights or light switches you're powering back through the neutral and that is one electrical circuit it's designated by how many amps or Watts you can have on that particular electrical circuit so for fifteen amps there's a different designation and 20 amps a different designation for how many devices and how many watts can be used or how much Emperors can be used there and that's when you look in your electrical panel you'll usually see a electrical device called a circuit breaker that has a rating between 15 or 40 60 or 100 amps on it and so one circuit is one circuit breaker that's how it should be so typically what you've got is the hot wire goes from the electrical panel first usually to an outlet and the reason for that being is that pretty much every room needs to have an outlet just by code or because you're gonna plug things in so what happens then is you could if you had something plugged in to the outlet like a fan or a lamp the hot the electricity would flow throw into the outlet through that electrical device that you've got whether it be a fan or a lamp and then it's going to come back through the cord in that electrical device and it's going to go down the neutral wire the thing goes back to the electrical panel so that would be the first path for the neutral wire or where the electrical current will go now not every room has not only but most do but let's say you had LightSwitch okay or lights that were powered in some way throughout your house what you're gonna have then is the hot wire it's gonna go down here and while the wire goes into the electrical outlet it's probably going to be wired noted together with several different wires and one of those wires can go back out to your light switches for whatever you're powering out there so you can see the electrical current could either go this way through the outlet or it can go this way alright to what we've got here which is a light switch in this light switch right now is open but as soon as we would close it it would allow electrical current to flow through it through the load wire which is basically the terminology for a hot wire that is going from a switch to an electrical device like a light a load wire is different from a hot wire in the same thing as a hot wire but the difference is in a load wire is that it doesn't always have electricity going through it so if the switch was open there wouldn't necessarily be electrical current flowing through the load water as soon as we close it there will be electrical current flowing from the switch to the load which is the light bulb or lights in this cases and it has the same voltage as a hot wire now because there is cancelling through it so in the current flows through the light and then it goes back down through the neutral water and we've shown this the neutral wire going through the switch box because for new houses that is the typical code for most places you need to have a neutral wire in your switch box now not every house will have that because some houses were built before then or you know sometimes an electrician doesn't do it that way but the majority of Municipalities codes in the United States you are supposed to have a neutral wire in your switch box now not all of them - but that is how it is supposed to be now it's not actually usually connected to anything unless you have a smart light switch then you in some cases will connect the neutral wire to smart switch because it will power that smart switch Wi-Fi chip it gives a half recurrent to flow through the light switch power in the Wi-Fi switch even when the lights are off in a circuit because that Wi-Fi switch needs power to communicate with your Wi-Fi router and receive and send signals even light switches off so we have shown the neutral here drawn the correct way going through the junction box like I said that is not always the case for older homes you may not have a neutral wire that goes through the junction box and usually the reason that you don't have that is because maybe several of these lights are daisy chained together and what you instead have is a neutral wire that may go like this I'm just gonna draw it in the dotted line here and it may connect instead from the end of the light back down to the outlet in that same room it's where the neutral water might go or it might just go directly back to the electrical circuit neutral wire but for newer houses most of them should go like this through the junction box in a neutral wire even though we've shown it as blue here it should typically be white the coloring for typical wiring in most places anomie black is hot white is neutral obviously if I drew it in white you wouldn't be able to see it on here so I'm not gonna draw it on your white just for neutral int Green is for ground okay so once that power goes through the neutral wire is coming back it's returning it once to return back to the electrical panel you can follow along here follow the orange arrows goes to the neutral wire most likely it is connected at our outlet and it's gonna flow past the outlet back to this neutral wire that is connected to the circuit breaker in the electrical panel here and that is the path of a neutral wire that is what a neutral wire is a neutral wire is the return path for current and we've shown you how an electrical circuit a typical one will work and then the last thing here just to explain to you you the ground wire okay so a ground wire is for your protection you want to make sure that you have a ground wire in your house and you should never use a ground wire as a neutral do not use a ground wire as a neutral you should never do that and the reason being this ground wire is to protect you when a device you have plugged in or a device you have installed like a light or lamp has a short-circuit where all the sudden the casing of that light switch of that electrical device for whatever reason there's a frayed wire and now you have live electrical energy electrifying that surface so that if you were to touch it you could potentially get electrocuted if you didn't have a ground wire but what the ground wire does is electricity travels in the path of least resistance so the ground wire provides less resistance than your body which means that if that device even if it's shorting out what's gonna happen is that power that energy is going to go back through the ground wire back through here all the way the electrical panel and down to the ground rod which is a rod literally usually driven down into the ground sometimes it's pipe sometimes it's rod but that ground wire is protecting you from getting shocked because it has less resistance than your body and electricity wants to follow the path of least resistance so typically the ground wire is connected I just wrote a little note ground connects to body of electro device typically if you were to open up an outlet or a light switch or a light or even installed on these things you probably have seen the little green screw that is typically connected to the metallic body of a device or the metallic conductors inside of the device and that is where the ground wire connects and protects you so it connects that ground screw that green screw into blue the ground wire is either a green wire or a unshielded copper wire so it doesn't have any insulation on it as you say bare copper wire and that is what a ground wire is so we hope this explained to you what is a neutral wire what a neutral wire does and just to reiterate a neutral wire is the return path for current and the typical wiring for an electrical home circuit is going to be black as hot white is the neutral wire in green or bare copper it's going to be your ground wire so we hope you enjoyed this please like and subscribe thank you

Channel: One Hour Smart Home

Views: 31,320

Rating: 4.8465471 out of 5

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Id: A72LRDx_CnA

Length: 11min 16sec (676 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 19 2020