Home wiring

Disclaimer: you need to check your local building codes to be absolutely sure.

What I have seen (and done) time-and-time again is this: Connect the 2 ground wires together along with a 3rd short pigtail, all in a wire-nut. Connect the pigtail to the ground lug on the outlet or switch (or to the box).

I believe it is safer to connect the ground pigtail directly to the outlet or switch ground-lug.

One other suggestion: if you can, don't connect all the outlets and the overhead light to the same circuit breaker. The load on the circuit breaker is not the issue -- the problem is, if that particular breaker goes bad you lose everything in that room simultaneously. If one or two outlets are on a different breaker, and a desk lamp or nightlight is plugged into those outlet, then you would still have some light/power in the room when the light breaker failed.

This has happened to me (breaker failure -- overhead light only). I have observed the practice I described in several homes.

As tibs says, put the plug outlets onto a separate breaker to the lights. Also, create a ring for the plug outlets, not just daisy-chain. (I.e. loop the end of the daisy-chain back to the breaker). Should give you (a) smaller wire requirement, thus a bit cheaper, and (b) a second path if something breaks in one leg.

Frankly, I am not so sure. At least, have your work checked by somebody qualified. In most jurisdictions, you are actually required to do that by law.

Normally, you have 3 wires in house installation: live (usually brown), neutral (usually blue) and protective earth (PE, usually green/yellow bicolour). Some heavy duty equipment may have 3 different live wires (brown, grey and black) carrying the voltage with different phase, giving a total of 5 wires. This includes kitchen ovens, air conditioning, flow through water heaters and the like.

Only in very old installations are neutral and PE connected at the outlet ("nulling"), this type of wiring has been forbidden for a long time, because it prevents the use of residual current devices (RCDs).

By the way, have you included a RCD in your fuse box? If not, reconsider because these thingies are real life savers if things go wrong. 30 mA is the prefered size for house installation.

when wiring lighting and plugs, the 2 two are not to be on the same circuit. they need their own breakers. color codes normally are Black for HOT, white for Neutral and Green for earth Ground. the neutral and earth ground are to be connected in the breaker box on the ground bus bar, then an earth ground electrode and possibly a water pipe that is near by that has been conductive tested connected to the ground bus bar using no smaller than 10 #awg bar copper wire. this is the NEC codes the last time i looked. P.S. Remote fault breakers (GFI's) are also required in some localities.

just thought i was spit in my 2 cents worth.

On Sat, 07 May 2005 11:18:55 -0700, Jamie wrote:

It's obvious that the two responders are from different countries. So color are different. That said, the original poster's question about running pigtails to the receptacles is right on. Running a pigtail with a ground is the way to go. If the box is metal ground it too. Don't rely on the box to ground the receptacle. Even if this is OK in some municipalities it is bad practice. Especially since you don't know what the next homeowner is going to do. Some people use the push in type of receptacle to bring the power in and use the screws to bring the power out to the next receptacle. Bad idea. Instead, use the screws provided for both power in and out. But a pigtail is still better. You can buy a high quality screwdriver in either phillips or flat. These screw drivers have a pin sticking out of the handle parallel to the screwdriver shaft. This short pin is for sticking the end of the wire in and making a U shape to fit the receptacle screw. These are high quality tools, low in price, and make the job go way faster. My father-in-law, who is a commercial electrician, helped me wire my machine shop from scratch. He worked hard but I worked a lot harder and learned tons. The guy from Puget Sound Energy, our power supplier, said it was one of the best wiring jobs he'd ever seen. Doing your job right will only add a small amount of time and expense and pay off with no trouble later on. A good example is your pig tail wiring of the receptacles. If one goes bad only a short wire needs to be removed and maybe replaced. Wirenuts are real easy to use and replacing the pigtail with the receptacle is no big deal. If the pig tail is OK then only one wire set needs to be messed with: the pigtail. You will not have to worry about any other wires in the box. Cheers., Eric

What place are you in? Here in Europe, there used to be black - live, grey - neutral and red - PE many, many years ago, but now its brown, blue and yellow/green. IIRC the change was made so that colour blind people (regardles of the type of colour blindness) couls safely do the connecting (dark-live, bright-neutral, bicolour-PE).

Yes, but that's all "behind" the fuse box. The idea is that all metal items (water pipes, heating...) is at ground level and can't "bite" anybody touching them.