Tracing Old Electrical Wiring
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- Опубліковано 5 сер 2024
- Electric Pro Academy - Real skills to make real money.
Synopsis:
Planning where to run wire is one thing, but figuring out where someone else has run wire is a whole different ballgame. In this video, Joel will demonstrate how he determines which wires go and which ones stay in a bathroom remodel project, and best practices for safety along the way.
Laced within the technical instruction are recommendations and points of professionalism employed daily by Jefferson Electric masters, journeymen, & apprentices.
If the instruction in this video is unclear or skew to what you are searching for, feel free to comment below for additional assistance. Got a question or ideas for a future video? Leave a comment below and submit your idea here: forms.clickup.com/f/23xa9-70/...
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National Electrical Code (NEC) referenced in this video:
Free Access Here: www.nfpa.org/codes-and-standa...
[] Protection of Conductors [NEC 240.4]
Outline:
0:00 - Introduction
0:26 - Identifying & Removing Switch Box Wiring
1:38 - Removing Vent Fan Wiring
3:07 - The Wrong Way To Find A Breaker
5:25 - Testing Resistance With A Multimeter
8:03 - Removing Mystery Switch Legs
13:11 - Removing Another Exhaust Fan
15:30 - Final Wrap-Up
Connect With Us:
Jefferson Electric services residential, commercial, solar, and Tesla systems in Indianapolis, IN.
www.jeffersonelectricllc.com/
/ jeffersonelectric
/ jefferson-electric-llc
22yr as an electrician and this is great stuff. Electrical work is diverse. I never handled residential wiring, it’s all new to me. Spent most of my experience on raceways and conduits. And I learned a lot more than I want to know about jackhammers and concrete saws.
Never have I thought I would be learning electrical work. Man you are really good at this. There’s a difference between knowing and loving what you do and you love your work. Thanks for sharing your knowledge
Tracing wires and troubleshooting are both challenging and rewarding and your good at both as well ... Thx Joel ...
I've been binge watching your videos. Now I have found so many things wrong with my panel that 3 other professional electricians either didn't see, or didn't mention when they were working on it. Thanks!
Glad i found your channel! Love all the videos and growing my knowledge on the trade
So satisfying to watch, you are a true artist! Keep it up 👍
I call it a continuity test, and I wire nut the two wires together then test the receptacles or I'll use my Klein tool tonner....! Keep up the good work my man...!!
You must be one of the dudes who stands around in the Home Depot parking lot all day.
You can only cut power off that way so many times until you run into a federal fire Pacific electrical panel and you start arc welding in an attic crawl space....
😆😆😆works usually though
Replacing one next week lol
in your "the wrong way to find a breaker" I'm reminded of a number of years ago I worked at a drydock. they were replacing the deck and cut through a wire that was (improperly) routed through a weld hole. I was asked to find the breaker so I thought just grounding it out would trip the breaker, like we've all done.
nope
the wire stayed there arcing like crazy until the cable caught fire. breaker never did trip. had to track it down the old fashioned way by actually tracing wire back to a distribution panel and shutting off breakers.
You're a great presenter Joel... thanks for the presentation
You do a great job teaching this stuff .
I did that same test trying to find the breaker, it didn’t work and I couldn’t find where the power was coming in. My electrician said “that happens sometimes on old houses” and capped it off. ??? 🤦♂️???
Also, I help our Maitainance guy at a nightclub in the mid nineties re-dux a section of drop line in conduit. It was 220 split to two 110 outlets (4 gang) for stand up coolers and then back to one 220 for a horizontal cooler. We shut off the breaker makes for that cooler area before I began to change all three of the broken outlets. Well. The panel was labeled wrong. So wrong that the breaker for this system was in a different part of the building. 220 makes a 8”, #2 Phillips into a stubby bar very quickly. Good thing I moped the area and let it dry before starting work. It took about three days for my hearing to come back. Good thing the screwdriver I was using was insulated by about a quarter inch of electrical tape around the handle. Never will forget that learning experience.
Thank you for this! I need to replace a circuit since the wire is cracking and is the old fabric/tar type as well as ground the circuit. I am running into all kinds of disconnected wiring from past jobs that are sending me on dead ends. Your video is great!
Absolutely love your content!
Thank you, for your your valuable information!!
You are having too much fun guys. Happy Valentine's everyone! 🍾🥂😁
I was bullied by some people while with my first employer during my apprenticeship all because I learned the basics here on UA-cam and applied those skills to remodel my house. I actually ended up having to quit my job and go on EBT for a bit because the stress was too much. These people tried everything in the book to make me think I'm worthless and have no ability to do electrical work. The people at my new job are soooooooooooooo much better to work with and treat me with the respect I deserve. I've been allowed to do WAY more electrical stuff at this new job and do an amazing job with all my work (According to the feedback I get). Actually, I ended up relapsing into depression because of the poor treatment I was receiving at my old job. Now I feel 1000x better and love my job.
That's the trade for you..... if you are in a shit place you need to move and there's nothing wrong with that
Exceptional, Joel brilliant teaching and some very good practical tips. Never work live in any setting - never for residential settings, and even for commercial and industrial work you have to plan for downtime for doing electrical work. Wagos 221 lever types are very useful for tracing out - using continuity test on the multimeter. Work with knipex fully insulated tools when cutting wires and clean up just that extra little bit of security. I find different colored tape for home runs and then different colors for spliced wired to other devices in a room can be useful especially if you have them rolled up and tucked away so you can identify the layout quickly when walking through again. Ideally you can draw room layout and identify cable locations.
Great video.
I wish the electricians I’ve used followed Jefferson electric ‘s practices. Stepped through my ceilings twice, no move to repair it just a shrug and “accidents happen.”
😬 Oh, we hate to hear that!
I prefer the s.p s.w. circuit finder method.😂. May I add for your viewers, it’s a good idea to wear a pretty good face mask when taking out old V.f’s or old h.v.l’s. That stuff in there is….well…everything. Excellent video my friend. I will subscribe.
When I worked in the central Control Room for the power company (thank goodness I wasn't on shift! ), an electrician in an important substation blacked out half of metropolitan Los Angeles by cutting through bundled cables. The prints said they were abandoned-in-place cables. They weren't. They were live control cables. When he cut through them he shorted the circuits and sent trip signals to every breaker in the switch rack. Moral of the story, don't cut through multiple wires, even if it's "only" Romex, even if you "think" it's not energized.
I made a pair of wire strippers by cutting a live wire with a load. The melted notch was exactly #12.
Awesome :)
Is there any chance you could try to do some even older wiring? My home was built in the 1870's, and get some of the first electric in the US likely in the late 1890 or early 1900's. The things I see in videos like this are useful, but still oh so new in comparison. Its not knob and tube, but rather in wood case channels. Tracing it through lathe and plaster walls is incredibly tricky - especially if you're not trying to rip apart the house in the process. But I've never seen anyone approach this who didn't just want to demo the whole house and all its character.
If you want to get behind the walls there's only 2 ways, having attic access or just cutting squares out of the wall and just screwing them back on. (It is not a problem covering up the seams and making it whole again just costs more money unfortunately) If you just want identification there's higher tier circuit tracers that can just use a 'wand' type that I use to identify wires underground or in concrete and cinderblock walls, but that is incredibly expensive if it's not for work.
If you can get the tubes out they make a easy cable way to pull new wiring.
I have one of those heaters in my lavatory. Nice when you take shower in winter time. I hope I don't have to take the ceiling down to get it out of there. It broke and I would like to get a new one. It has one switch that operated the whole thing though, and I thought to make the lights and heat independently switched, but I haven't got that far yet. Not sure if it exhaust to outside or not. Everything else in this house is exactly wrong from ground wires being cut and ignored, to a bootleg ground in the lavatory to fool the inspector. I got a nice shock from my metal housing vacuum cleaner over that. It was not fun.
I made a plug that was wired for a dead short and a switched power strip just for the purpose of tripping a breaker. Safer than creating an arc, so just a suggestion. Of course it won't work with a GFCI though, but if GFCI is at the breaker, then you'll know. That's a big thing here too. My panel should be relocated. I planned on using the existing box as one big junction box to make all the connections to run the wires from the old panel to the new. Inspectors might frown on that. I should also have AFCI and GFCI and Surge... I swear the NEC are electricians that feel they don't have enough work to do, or think that people are made of money. Prior to all of it, got along for hundreds of years without it just fine.
I like hearing about getting rid of 14 gauge. I think minimum should be 12 regardless of circuit, except of course 220 that require 10. I'd like to see 14 disappear completely though. People have a lot more than a light bulb these days. I myself use Halogen 100 Watts, mainly because I'm old and my sight is failing, but I also like my glass light bulbs that get hot when I turn them on, and they don't flicker like LEDS do.
I have nail problems too. The idiot that installed junction and gang boxes used nails, going right through the box. No grounds on anything, and he cut the ground wires when he could have used them. Even installed three pronged outlets but ignored the ground. So all kinds of fun if a nail touched a hot wire.
I am actually doing a very similar job to what you are showing. Adding a pantry to a kitchen expansion and bathroom reduction with an office redo too.Just add a 10' sub panel move in the middle of it. Two 12" J boxes for the wires and supply extensions. Fortunately they stripped all the drywall and I have good attic access. Seems they liked to rely on conduit grounds a lot in the old days. The mess is there were too many so called electricians in this house over the years. Cheers bro, I feel the chopping exploration. You got to be Sherlock Holmes to figure this mess out, eh?
I did that blow the breaker at the factory I worked at. The Maintenance Manager caught me, "What the hell do you think you are doing?". I explained that I could turn off breakers one at a time for the next several minutes, because nothing was labeled out in the plant, or I can go lockout the blown breaker and get on with the task at hand. He left muttering, "I didn't see anything, I didn't see anything..."
If you suspect a home owner or incompetent fool did the wiring. Start from scratch and redo the complete house. You will thank your lucky stars, because this places are a fire hazard waiting to go up in flames.
Sounds good in theory but cost (ability of the owner to pay for it) is always a factor.
Tore down wall and need to reconnect power to upstairs Continuous line but now the wire/cable is too short to connect it at a different location. How do you properly connect power by code without adding a hidden Junction box behind a wall or ceiling?
Tore down wall and need to reconnect power to upstairs Continuous line but now the fire is too short to connect it at a different location. How do you properly connect power by code without adding a hidden Junction box behind a wall or ceiling?
"Kinetic friction"? 🙂 Nice invention of a new term and new physics.
😅 Sometimes my mouth gets ahead of my brain. Been an electrician a long time now, but doing it on camera is a whole different animal!
@@ElectricProAcademy You applied the concept correctly, even if you just did it intuitively. Most first year physics classes would probably refer to the force generated by friction as the net force of friction whether they were talking about an item in motion or static.
But technically, the force of friction can still be for a kinetic or static object, and so therefore it can be a kinetic or static frictional force, or how you said it so succinctly, kinetic friction :D
You should removed those two light bulbs before you attempted to remove the old Fan Junction Box !
I use to do that to find breakers. Till one time.... It didn't pop a breaker, stayed hot. Made me think where else could of arc'ed besides my joint. Which started a slew of bad thoughts for customer safety. So since then I stopped, unless I have no other options.
House ended up having a big neutral imbalance, how it was before I touched it.
Hi can you please send me the link for shower lights, I can use
Wooooooooooooo !
I am updating some wiring at my residence. The home was built in late 1980s and most wiring appears to have been DIY with limited experience or skills. Truly a mess and what is on circuits makes no sense. Running dedicated circuits to several appliances and "rearranging" several circuits to avoid overloads and so disconnecting one circuit does not turn off power for most of semi finished basement. The project is more involved then I had originally anticipated as I am discovering more issues then I was aware of.
Sounds right 😅. Let us know if a live video call would be helpful: electric-pro-academy.square.site/!
Please do a video on how to traces wires in walls for beginners you are really great at teaching but this is alittle to advance for me
@@ElectricProAcademy thank you sir 🙂
Nothing worse than trying to figure out how a hack electrician from 50 years ago wired a house.
Or 80 years ago with braided romax
So, you've been to my house? 😂
I am a big fan of using a dust mask when removing old bathroom fans. They are always the nastiest!
What happens if someone uses 14 awg wiring on a 20 amp breaker instead of 12 awg? 👀
What fell out @ 2:41??
With you being an actual electrician, I would like your opinion on something. Is it safe to replace/install a light fixture, ceiling fan, etc by just turning off the switch? Or should you flip the breaker? And I'm talking about DIYers, not professionals.
Totally safe so long as you've communicated to anyone who might make the human error of turning it on while you're working. Electrically speaking, a switch is a miniature disconnect, it's not going to reenergize if no one is touching it.
Best tool is Knipex fence post nail pliers
End nippers
Anyone who has done renovations to old houses will have horror stories about electrical. Often, all you can do is shake your head and wonder why the house didn't burn down.
I can’t sleep at night knowing what the wires look like in my house . Is that normal?
Fluke 101. Is a great Meter And affordable.
Didnt show how you checked the outlet. Just walked back and said what else could it be?
I have a 60-year-old single story house and it would cost me $12.000 to replace the box and more to upgrade and $30.000 to rewire house that $40.000 altogether.
curved claw hammer?
How can I trace circuits in a 45+ yr old house...
I have a et310... can trace most circuits to breakers... I have I circuit that seams to have alot of draw but I can't find the breaker with the tester
Noticed you found and commented on this video: ua-cam.com/video/6032wL66RGA/v-deo.html&lc=UgxPe7S5En0iMSdVL2x4AaABAg. Hope it was helpful!
Hot connected to a ground... yep, DIYer right there .... hate when you find stuff like that
Almost certainly a 3-way switch.
Where's the cloth sheathing!?
That's really not that old. Try a pre 80s project for real fun.
Why not just use a klien wire tracer from home depot for $80 to trace wires
Electrical work is not a hobby higher a license electrician. Don’t make the mistake and practice on your own house. You just might make the 6 o’clock news when your house is on fire..
I gave this Video Blog a BIG THUMBS down because of Your constant yelling Whooo ! all the time !!!😠
@@ElectricProAcademy he's just a hater don't let him get you down your doing just fine man. Keep up the great work.
I wish that You would stop yelling Whoo ! every time you cut a cable ! It's irritating and giving me a Headache !
Mans really out here complaining your getting free advice from a master electrician who works his ass off doing that and making these videos for us so really a tiny thing like audio if it bothers you so much turn down you volume don't use earbuds or headphones come on man use your head.
“Dead!”
Does Anyone else try to not use that term while doing electrical?
I try to say “Off!”
Something about saying “dead” while doing electrical work doesn’t feel right.