Welcome to this edition of CircuitBread Practicals, where we are going to replace
an outlet. Before we do that, I want to actually point out the different parts of an outlet because
this is quite important. So as you look at an outlet, you’ll notice that there's three
distinct holes here and you will have wires in the back that correlate with each of these holes.
Now you have here on the left your neutral, you have here on your right your hot,
you have here on the bottom the ground. So as you know your hot is where you're actually getting the
energy where it's driving everything and then your neutral, if you're an electrical engineer you can
consider as your ground because it is making a circuit between your hot and your neutral.
And then the ground here is just a safety connection so that if anything goes wrong
in your hot, your neutral touches where it's not supposed to touch, it'll go to ground instead of
electrifying the chassis or electrifying whatever you have plugged in and then it'll also create a
short circuit hopefully and that will cause the breaker to trip and you'll know that something's
wrong instead of everything being terrible. So, if you look on the back you can actually see that for
the neutral, you have these two connection points right here, the hot, you have these
two connection points right here, and your ground is actually down here on the bottom.
Now obviously, I have already taken this out and I tested to make sure this is off. Before you touch
anything, you can get something, I think this cost us eight dollars at Lowe's and you can just
put it in and if everything goes well, you should get absolutely nothing and that is how come I can
touch these things without getting hurt. So you can either get one of these really cheap testers,
a multimeter as long as you make sure that you have it set for AC. I've heard some people
complain that multimeters can cause problems because if you don't have it set for AC you
can put it in and it's measuring DC and there's no DC voltage and you can shock yourself and that's a
legitimate concern. So if you don't know what you're doing, you don't have the right tools,
just call an electrician but this is pretty straightforward and if you take care of yourself
and you make sure that everything's turned off at the breaker, you should be quite safe.
So with that, this is where I'm going to actually pull out this outlet and replace it with a new
one. This is a tamper resistant outlet which is absolutely terrible but required by law.
At least until the inspection is done. So we are going to take this one out and going to replace it
with this one. Now to do this, ideally, all you'll need is a simple tool like this which you can swap
it out and get your flathead, your phillips, and even if you go to the other side you can get
this square bit which is used quite a bit in your different... um... electrical stuff. Ah,
that's the technical term, stuff. However, I have a lot of different other tools here
that can be used for different reasons. Obviously, we already went over this, this is a tester and
this is to both test it to make sure that it's dead before you work on it and then also when I
finish something up and I turn on the breaker, I like to put this back in and make sure that
I've wired it correctly. If I've wired it correctly, it'll show me that I don't have
a floating ground and that I haven't reversed my polarities and all that sort of stuff. So these,
these are pretty nice for how cheap they are. If I need to make any adjustments to the wire,
cut it, trim it, strip it some more, you are going to need a pair of strippers
and then if you're going to do a lot, you'll definitely want some sort of impact driver to
unscrew this from the wall and screw it back in. And then finally if you're doing a lot, it's nice
just to have another screwdriver so you're not flipping this back and forth and back and forth
and you just have your phillips and your flathead because you need your flathead for your cover.
Okay and then finally even though on this one as you can see, it's wired on the sides, sometimes
people will shove the wire into these holes in the back. Now this is sized for a 14 gauge wire
where these are 12 gauge wires and it's really quite simple. So if you're installing this and
I'll just use this one as an example, if you're installing this you can just take your wires,
strip off just a little piece and shove it in there and that's it. You don't have to worry about
curling it around here and tightening it. But there's two problems with this. The bigger
problem is that they tend to fail. I replaced all the outlets in my last house and I did it
with that and I had an outlet just completely fail. It stopped working, I don't know what
happened but I had to replace it and I was talking to an electrician and he said that that happens
quite a bit and that's why he never does - never uses those. So the number one reason why you don't
use those is because you don't want it to fail and so you get much better connection point with
these. And then the second reason is that they're kind of a pain to take out. If you have the wires
in there and you need to replace it, and this is where I get this thin multi-tool right here,
you take it and you shove it in this hole and you have to push in while also pulling the wire
out and that's the only way to get it out. It's not that big of a deal and frankly if that were
the only problem I would still definitely do that. However, the fact that it's prone to failing makes
me want to stick with wiring those on the side. So with that, let's take this off.
So we just unscrew these and it's pretty straightforward and if you do a lot of
these if you're replacing all of them in your house, you'll get into a rhythm and you will
have your way of doing it. I found that for some reason I just work from hot to neutral
to ground. I'm not sure why, that's just the way I do it and if you have a different way,
that's fine. I don't know which one's which because it doesn't matter in this case but one of
these is coming into the box bringing in power and one of these is going out of the box taking it to
the next outlet down the line. As you're looking in the back here, excuse me, on the sides, you can
see that these two screw points are connected by this little tab right here on both sides
and so that makes it so that when you are connecting your two blacks together,
you are connecting them directly in parallel and this way you don't have to make any pigtails
in there, anything like that. Now if you only have one wire you just hook it up and you're at
the end of your circuit and it's totally fine. It makes things simpler because you only have half as
many wires to put in. But very often this is the configuration that you will find your circuit in.
So now that I've taken out the old one, I can take this. Now, if necessary, if I bent something and
it feels like I've done some damage okay you just take it you cut it off this is 12 gauge
wire so on this one 12 gauge wires this bottom one, if I were using 14 gauge wire it'd be this
top one, you just take it you get enough of it that you need. You don't want to make it
too long because you don't want too much spare wire sitting around and where it can
accidentally make connections. So then you just take it and you bend it. If I can do this right
and I found that I normally have to also crimp it just a touch to get it the right
shape. Now this copper wire is surprisingly tough but you definitely don't want to overwork
it and have it break in there and then you're troubleshooting and you might cause a fire all
those sorts of things. So if you aren't certain about the quality of your wire going into it,
you can just trim it and get some fresh wire. Taking this, obviously, these are different brands
but they are the same style setup and that you've got the hot on this side and got a little spot
to hold it. Sometimes I’ll take it and kind of shove that in there when you're tightening it, it
sometimes sucks it in, sometimes it doesn't, but you really want to make sure that you don't have
excess wire sticking out here. I have enough space that it's making good contact here with the screw
but it has nothing coming out here that might contact something in the back. So that's a
good length right there. That's kind of what we want. So let me put on the other one. You see
this one's a little bit longer but it's still not sticking out. So I can tighten this down
and so now I have connected my two hot wires
in parallel and those are connected to these two outlets. I'll flip it over and get my neutrals in
and if you are going to be doing a lot of these, I recommend getting some sort of gloves because this
really tears up your hands after a while and makes your hands not happy at all. But let's get these
two neutral wires done and as you can see again copper is pretty ductile, pretty flexible, so
you can do some pretty interesting stuff to it and won't have any problems and then finally got this
safety ground. Now, I'm not sure if I was supposed to cover it or somebody else but we got a lot of
overspray when they spray painted the walls and so you might have to clean it and if it doesn't look
like you have a good contact spot, you can just either use a screwdriver or use this even though I
feel like that's a terrible use of a tool to just kind of scrape off any excess paint or any other
things that are covering it up. But you just want to make sure that you're actually getting a good
contact here. Now, again, if you're using this tester if you don't have a good contact here,
well, if you have no contact there, it'll notice that. But at the same time I don't
think that tester will do a very good job if you have kind of an intermittent contact or
just not a great contact. So better to make sure visually that you're really getting in there.
So as you can tell here, ground, nice and good, your neutrals that are connected
again to your larger holes here on the side, they also look good. They have good contact
and they're not sticking out in excess and everything is looking good and ready to go.
So now, what we can do is we can just take these wires and curl them
and you shove them back in there. Again making sure you don't want this ground wire, which is
fully exposed, to come up and touch anything on the sides. So you are definitely paying attention
as you do this and you put that in and then you either use your screwdriver or your impact driver
to put these in right like that. Now sometimes, if your drywallers were a bit over aggressive
and make that hole too big you need to go and you need to get something kind of like this and these
are called outlet spacers and it's something that you can take and just stick on the screw
like that and that's that's basically so you have a more mechanically sound
outlet. You definitely don't want to make it so when you're pushing it in it's moving inside
against the wall like that because that just that's not cool. So you definitely have different
tools and things available for you to make it so it will stay nice and tight.
All right, now that that was not too horribly painful you notice there's
some space up here so you can actually wiggle these things around and so I like to leave it
a little bit loose. I actually tightened that bottom one a little bit too much,
and then for some reason I cannot tell if it's straight up or down until I put this cover on
so I'll usually put this on and I will make sure that it's centered before I snug it down.
So, not my masterpiece but it is functional and last step would be to go and turn on the circuit
breaker, plug this back in, make sure that the lights light up in the appropriate way so make
sure you did it correctly, make sure nothing tripped. If you have that ground in there and
it accidentally touches something, you will trip your breaker almost immediately and then you can
go back in and fix it. But that's really it. So hopefully that was helpful. If it was,
give this video a like. Subscribe to our channel for more practical videos but also we are going
back to the electronics and electrical engineering topics very very soon and
we're very excited about that hope you have a good one and we'll catch you in the next video.