Some Hopefully Helpful Electrical Tips

[Hostile]

People are scared of electricity. I think this is a good thing. Used wrong, it can hurt you. Maintaining the electrical works in your home is critical.

I want to start with smoke detectors and carbon monoxide detectors.

A huge common mistake with smoke detectors is where they get placed in a house. Forgive the bold. They have to be 4 feet away from any air moving source or they are useless. Think about it, if something is moving the smoke away from the detector it can't work.

I can't even begin to tell you how many times I get called to do an inspection and see smoke detectors near ceiling fans or a couple of feet away from an air vent. Apartments are notorious for this because Maintenance men install battery operated units and they simply look for a place up high because smoke rises.

So take some time to look at where your smoke detectors are installed and make sure they are not handicapped by their location.

There should be a smoke detector in every bedroom and at least one more in the living room. Not a kitchen? No, they should not be in a kitchen but if one is it is not hurting anything.

Do you need a Carbon Monoxide detector? Only if you have gas in your home. If your home is all electrical, you really do not need it. The main place for a CO detector is near a gas furnace. If your furnace has a cracked heat exchanger the CO detector can save your life. The furnace needs to be replaced if this happens.

As a former fireman I will also give a plug for fire extinguishers. I think you should have one in the kitchen under the sink and one in the garage if you have one. They need to be tested at least every couple of years to make sure they still work. This does not mean discharge some powder and say "yep, it works." Take it to be tested by a fire safety retailer or service.

One more thing about fire safety in your home. If your home catches fire and you can turn on the shower and soak towels to act as a filter to help you breathe. If you can get your clothes soaking wet, do it. If you cannot get out of your house, close the bathroom door, stuff wet towels under it to keep smoke out, get in the shower and turn the water on full blast. If there is a small window in the bathroom open it so you have oxygen and a way to yell for help.

If you have a 2 story house I highly recommend each upstairs window has access to an emergency ladder. The kind you mount on the window sill and the rungs drop down to safety.

Okay, not all of that was about electricity, but it is because electrical fires are a potential risk.

 

[Hostile]

When do electrical fires happen? Two main times. People over ride circuits or you have old, braided wiring in your house. The modern plastic coated and grounded wiring is much safer. Rats and mice eat the old braided wire coating and once they sink teeth into hot electricity they can burn themselves up and take your house with them. It is rare, but it does happen. So keep your house rodent free.

Okay, the first thing I want to tell you about electricity is that your electrical panel should have a proper label for every single fuse (screw in) or circuit breaker (has a flip switch). If you do not have it labeled, take the time and do it. I have a little label maker and every job I work on the circuit gets a label.

The easy way to figure out what powers what is to plug a radio into an outlet or turn on the lights and see what goes off when you flip the switch or remove the fuse. There's a fancy tool you can buy that is fun to have but this method is just as effective. The tool has a plug in and then you go back to the panel and the handheld tool scans each fuse or circuit and beeps when the correct one is found. You don't need that, anything electrical works just as easily.

Okay, most outlets have 3 wires. The copper wire is a ground wire. The white wire is called a common. The black wire is hot. That is the one that will zap you.

Always turn off electricity when working on outlets or switches and you are safe from getting shocked.

Lets say you want to change the outlets and switches in your house to decorator style. Those look like this.

Not everyone likes these, but some people do. I am using them as an example of why you might want to change. If you are selling your home, you might want to consider this.

On outlets there are screws on both sides of the outlet. The screws on one side will be silver. The screws on the other side will be brass. The white or common wires attach to the silver screws. The black or hot wires attach to the brass screws. The ground wires will attach to a green screw at the top of the outlet. You will see some outlets that the wires are stripped and shoved into holes in the back of the outlet. It is still white to silver side and black to brass side.

Note the picture. You will notice that one slot is slightly bigger than the other. That is the hot side. You also see the ground prong hole. It should be down as shown. It doesn't make it work any better, it is just the way it is supposed to be.

One last thing. Outlets are either 15 amp or 20 amp. If you take an outlet off look at the rating. 15 amp outlets will be wired with 14 gauge wire and the fuses or circuits will be 15 amps. 20 amp outlets will be wired with 12 gauge wire and will have 20 amp fuses or circuits. Do not, under any circumstance, put a 20 amp outlet on a 15 amp circuit. The outlets are designed to burn out before the wiring. If you put a stronger outlet on the wiring you make the wiring the fail point and that is potentially bad.

Outlets are wired in series. One outlet in a series receives the wires that go directly back to the panel. These wires are called the load. As long as the circuit is on, these are hot. Other wires are attached inside the outlet boxes and run in series to the next outlets until they get to the last outlet. They do not become hot until attached to the load and the circuit is on.

So lets say you have a bedroom with 5 outlets. One of them is going to have only 1 wire with the 3 colors coming into the box. That outlet is the last one in the series for that room. The others will all have at least 2 wires with the 3 colors. The first outlet in the series receives the load and then the wires attached to it all receive power from it and take that power to the next outlet in the series.

So lets assume in this bedroom with 5 outlets 3 of them are not working. This means that the 3rd to the last outlet in the series is not making a connection and it is affecting that outlet and the next 2. I want to stress to you that figuring out the series the outlets are wired in is not all that important. You just need to open the 3 outlets and check all the connections. One is going to be loose.

If all the outlets have no power there are only 2 possible problems and one of them is obvious. The circuit is off, or the very first outlet in the series has the bad connection. Check the circuit first.

If a fuse is blown you may see the glass is black, or the spring inside is collapsed, or the band inside is burned in half. A circuit will be "tripped." Or not quite off or on, it rests in the dead center. To reset a circuit breaker simply turn if off for about 5 seconds and then back on. If it trips immediately you have a problem. Usually it means something is unsafe.

One time I got a call for a circuit that kept tripping. I reset it and it tripped. I said, something plugged into those outlets is bad. I was told no way. I went to the first outlet and there was a lamp. A brand new lamp in fact. Never been used before. I looked at the wire and part of the wire was melted and the wires were touching. That caused the trip. The lamp was defective and the person got their money back.

You can also do this by over loading a circuit. Plugging too many things into it. I always recommend that every expensive electrical device like a computer or an HD TV have a surge protector.

Now and then I run into situations where someone has a plug in heater and an older house with fuses. They complain that the fuses keep popping. If you are going to use a plug in heater I do not recommend you running anything else that draws a lot of power at the same time on that same circuit. Devices that get hot like curling irons, hair dryers and plug in heaters draw heat in the wiring.

While on the subject of curling irons and hair dryers, any outlet in the bathroom or near the kitchen sink (within 3 feet) should be on a GFCI outlet. These are the ones that look like this.

If you do not have one of these in the bathroom or next to the kitchen sink I recommend you remedy that. It is for your safety. They are designed to trip if water interrupts the circuit. You know the old murder movies where someone is found in a bathtub and a plugged in toaster is in the water? It can't hurt you if you have a GFCI.

One last thing on outlets. Some outlets are dedicated. You usually see this either in a bedroom that does not have a light fixture (that used to be common) or under the sink for a disposal. Usually in the bedroom there was one socket on one outlet that was to be used for a lamp. For bedroom lighting you had to plug into that socket and then use the switch as normal.

If you have an outlet like this you cannot simply change the outlet to a new one without one minor alteration. On the side of the outlets you will see that there are brass or silver plates between the 2 screws. On this there will be a small wing. In the photo below it is right above the letter E in the watermark.

http://image.shutterstock.com/displ...nstalled-white-electrical-outlet-60068032.jpg

That tab has to be broken on one side of the outlet or the other. If you don't, the switch that is meant to operate just the one socket on that outlet will operate every socket on every outlet in the room.

Breaking off that tab makes that socket dedicated to the switch.

Now, having said that, if the room does not have this dedicated socket already, breaking that tab will not make a socket dedicated.

Under a sink this happens when one socket powers the disposal which is switched and the other powers a dishwasher for example.

 

[Hostile]

Switches are slightly different than outlets. A switch interrupts or completes a connection to send electricity to something, usually a light. So a switch is placed only on one of the two electrical legs, the white or the black. It is more common on the black. When the switch is on the connection inside the switch is touching and electricity is flowing though the wiring. When it is off the connection is not being made and the electricity is not flowing.

Fairly simple really.

A different kind of switch is a photo cell. Usually these are placed on exterior lighting. When it reaches a certain level of darkness the switch is activated and the lights come on.

A motion sensor is yet another type of switch. It is activated by motion, usually after dark on flood lights that are also operated by a photo cell. These 2 switches keep them from coming on in daylight. The photo cell activates the motion sensor, and motion activates the flood lights.

Light fixtures can make or break a house for some people. If you are thinking about upgrading the lighting in your house it can seem like a daunting task but really it is just time consuming.

Wiring in lights is exactly like wiring in outlets. The only difference is you may find red or blue wires as well. All extra colors of wires are black. Meaning they are all hots and not commons or grounds. A red or blue wire may power the fan portion of a ceiling fan and the black will power the lights. If you have just standard wiring (black, white, ground) to a light fixture but the fixture has ground, white, black, and blue (or any other color) the blue is wired to the black. It is hot.

The main thing you want to do when changing lighting besides wiring it properly is to make sure it is secure to a wall or ceiling. Especially ceiling fans.

 

[Route 66]

Another interesting tip is when I used to install avionics in flight simulators, we used a magnet to test the smoke alarm. We simply waved a magnet next to the detector and set it off. I don't always trust the test buttons.