by Larry Angell
I often get visitors at my site asking about electrical home wiring and different wiring methods and projects. Their main concern is to attempt to do the electrical project or hire it out to professionals.
Because of the housing crunch and financial market crisis, Im now seeing many people that cant get construction loans to pay contractors to do the work for them. I see many people doing the construction for themselves because they have to and not just to save money.
Many do it yourselfers have no problem with things like drywall and home framing, but they are often doubtful about wiring their homes.
First of all, the most important thing to observe is safety. All home electrical work thats done needs to be on disconnected circuits. The next thing to understand is that all electrical wiring jobs need to be inspected whether its done by the homeowner or professionals. This helps to ease the fears that homeowners often have wondering if their home wiring projects are going to be dangerous to them.
You dont need to have a thorough knowledge of electrical theory to do your own home wiring. The most important thing is to know the local residential electrical wiring codes because they will be the guidelines the electrical inspectors will follow. Electrical diagrams and formulas really help in understanding how to run the circuits.
If you can look at a drawing, photo, or other illustration, you can get a good understanding how the cable is run. There are a few types of cable that are used in home construction. Non-metallic sheathed cable or more commonly called, Romex cable is often used for home electrical wiring.
Romex has different types, sizes and quantity of wires per cable according to the needs of the wiring circuit. Its standard to use 12-2 and 12-3 cable for light switches and outlets. This means that the cable size is a 12-gauge thickness with either 2 or 3 wires in each cable. These types of indoor cables are used on 120-volt circuits which means only one of the wires is a hot conductor.
Certain appliances in the home need extra voltage and so these will have thicker wire and usually two hot conductors. These are 240-volt circuits. Water heaters, clothes dryers, air-conditioners and heating systems will typically use 10-2 or 10-3 cable. This always depends on local electrical codes though.
The heavy electrical usage circuits that use a special cable are ovens and ranges. These appliances require a lot of electricity and they use special range cable which is usually two 6-gauge cables as hot wires and one 8-gauge cable as a neutral wire.
The low-voltage home wiring systems include phone wiring, security systems, and home networking systems. These are usually wired with Category 5 cable or more commonly called Cat5 cable which is an 8-wire cable made for communications systems.
Its easiest to map out circuit runs in your home using graph paper so you can keep everything to scale. Youll need a floor plan of your home for drawing each electrical circuit on. Youll want to make several copies of these floor plans because youll have many circuits.
Once you know where you want to put the electrical circuits, you can plan for the breaker panel box needs. The new minimum size of breaker panel is a 200-amp panel with a minimum of at least 40 breaker slots. All the circuit runs begin at the breaker box with a breaker or fuse that pops into the panel box.
There are several dedicated circuits in home wiring. This means that only one fixture or appliance can be wired on the circuit. This standard is always according to the local electrical regulations and codes.
All home wiring electrical circuits will be have to be inspected at different intervals during the home construction process. The electrical inspector has to make sure all codes have been followed. This is a good thing because it helps us feel safe knowing we did the wiring correctly and were not going to catch fire in our sleep at night.