hello and thanks for tuning in
today we're going to look at a outlet specifically a gfci one ground fault circuit interruption
why you would need one if you need one i'm not an electrician so this is not a walk through this is
not a how-to this is just something that i came across in my house while dealing with some plugs
in a 30 year old house so some of the reasons that you might want a gfci plug is areas that
are wet like a bathroom and if you look here there is a plug that plug right there is not protected
by anything meaning if you have a hair dryer plugged in or a shaver and you're using it and
you drop it in the water or something you could potentially get shocked and die well if you
had a ground fault circuit interruption plug there gfci or as some people call a gfi plug
it's designed to minimize that risk and trip inside here electrically and kill all power
within a split second so on your newer houses it's pretty much non-existent um they're all
by code i believe they're all required to have it in wet areas or damp areas or anywhere inside it's
using um water or sink by a live electrical outlet this is an older house about 30 years old so
code back then was not the same um like i said i rented some problems so i ended up changing a lot
of sockets and i figured i might as well just go ahead and update all of them to proper code and
check your local um permitting department make sure you don't need any permits or anything like
i said this is not a how-to it's just how i'm doing it and just a little knowledge so we'll
look at the plug-in we'll talk about it all right the gfci plug is basically a plug that
has um a little device in there that trips when it senses power i guess overloading going the
wrong way or however it doesn't i have no idea i'm not an electrician um basically it has the
four regular terminals just like a plug you get your two hots and your two neutrals
for power and i guess and powering another switch or wherever the line goes from there
has back stabs is what they're called i'm going to use these because it's the easiest
they do like to work their way out over time i've heard so people usually will fish hook
it around the screw i'm just going to backstab it in there and tighten this down and basically
just send it in and that'll be that so yeah these are like i said good for wet areas
areas that are prone to have moisture or running water like a sink right here it's just for your
protection and like i said i believe it's code now so you're going to need a few tools
some type of voltage tester line tester multimeter something to test the socket make sure it's dead
because you do you have to turn the power off to do this you don't want to get electrocuted
screwdrivers and strippers wire strippers and um a flashlight because it's going to be dark
so the first thing i like to do is check the circuit
and i like to make sure that basically everything looks good and if you see the two orange
middle and the right correct wiring i just like to check the plug while it's live and make sure
everything's correct cause if something's wrong you're gonna have to correct that before you
plug in a new plug otherwise it could be a dangerous situation so we know that it's
wired correctly and then i have this little tester
and it'll show that's my hot side that's my hot side this is the neutral
and this is the neutral so left is on the new left side is neutral and the right side is the hot side
so we have to go out to the circuit breaker and flip some circuits
all right we're at the fuse panel here um they all commonly look the same yours is not going to look
like this i have the paneling off um that would normally be covering all the breakers and the
wires but as i said i ran into some problems here this old house so i had to make sure everything
was okay and i will be putting this back on for safety you'll have a little circuit directory card
um filled out hopefully in there tells you what each circuit is i know which one it is should
be number 14. so on the right side here go 2 4 6 8 10 12 14 and i know that that's the one so um
your panel may be different and usually they go like one
two three four five six seven eight nine ten so on and so forth all the way down
um so make sure the power's off and we're gonna go back in there and make sure everything's off
okay so the power is off hopefully this is coming good on camera we're gonna test it again
make sure there's no power and as you can see it's staying green
so we got no power there and then i will double check
and as you can see i'll pull it away so you can see it they're not lit up
it's only the light shining through the bottom so this circuit is dead the next
thing we're going to do is take out the center screw there to expose the wall plate
okay once the wall plate is removed you can see the exposed socket and start to see the
wiring in the back there i'll change the lighting here so you can see it
and as you can see the wiring is back there so what we'll do is you want to take out two screws
there's um one here and there's one up top here take those two screws out and pull the entire
plug out from the wall all right now that we got the plug pulled out and you can see the wires are
exposed in the back either cut those wires off with some cutters or if you're they're wrapped
around the terminal screws on the hook them so you basically just want to get rid of this plug
make sure you keep the wires on the side that they're on the black happens to be on my right
and the white on the left keep them in those areas because they need to stay like that okay so we
got the plug pulled off and as you can see we have the wire stripped back um we have the two neutrals
which are the white ones on the left there along with the ground and we have two hots on the right
that are black so you may or may not have some wire stripped off depending on how your
wire was hooked up if you have to you know cut it clean and make a new strip just pull
the insulation off of it and every one of the um newer plugs now has see if i can get this in focus
they have like a strip gauge right there
that line right there you put it in there and strip your wire to that length some
of mine are a little short so it'll be all right it'll work but yeah let's get the um
plug hooked on there and basically you want one wire to one screw
or one terminal that's what it's designed for don't try jamming two wires in the same spot
one terminal one wire let's get it hooked up and see how it looks
okay we got everything hooked back up i want to talk real quick about the lines
so you're going to have a load line and you're going to have um
basically you're going to have two the two sets of lines here one's going to have the
voltage coming in and the other one's going to be like a feed line to the next circuit
so again i'm not electrician i don't know which one was which i just wired it straight back in
the same way that i took the old plug out it's a 50 50 shot if you turn the power back on and the
socket don't work then you know you just have to reverse the set of black and white leads around to
the ones like top to bottom bottom top basically always make sure that you have your ground screw
hooked up down there it's very important to have that into the green tap and what we're going to do
now is we're going to push it carefully back into the wall and secure it with two screws
all right we got the gfci pushed back into the wall and secured in at this point you
put your wall plate on and go ahead and turn your power back on and make sure it's working
i'm going to turn it back on now because i don't like to put a wall plate on
and have to keep flipping a breaker something's wrong i don't recommend it
because anything open is a possibility for electrocution so put your wall plate
back on then flip the breaker but i'm gonna go flip mine now so i can test it
all right as you can see the trip circuit is lit and that's how they come
um i did have that problem i talked about just before with the load and the line being switched
so when i flipped the breaker nothing happened but now we'll push the test button and lights come on
so let's get everything together now and start putting the wall back together
i apologize my camera died like twice on me i like to put these little foam
inserts on to cover up the holes for any drafts or anything this is in the basement
they sell these at your hardware stores um in packs of like six or ten
and they just fit right over it the little screw holes so now you just put your base plate over it
but i'm doing a special base plate that has like a magnetic snap-on face to kind of go
with the theme down here little brush bronze so let me get that backing plate on first
all right we got the backing plate on and you don't want to over tighten any type of backing
plate plastic you know 99 white ones or any type one you just wanted to really touch the wall and
that's it and we're gonna slap this easy magnetic cover on and we're done so i want to go back and
check and make sure my sockets and everything are good and as you can see correct wiring
correct wiring
test it out one more time and that works hope this helps thanks for watching please subscribe