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 and financial crisis, Im observing that many people cant get home loans to hire contractors to do the construction for them. Im seeing many people doing the work for themselves out of necessity and not simply to save money.

Most homeowners dont have a problem with things like building walls and putting in floors, but they are often doubtful about home wiring.

First of all, the most important thing is safety. If any electrical work is done, you need to make sure that youre not working on energized circuits. The next point is that all home wiring jobs need to be inspected whether its done by you or a professional. This helps assuage the fears that homeowners have wondering if their home wiring projects are going to be a fire hazard to them.

You dont need to have a complete knowledge of electricity to do your own wiring. The most important thing is to know the local residential electrical codes because they will be the mandatory requirements the electrical inspectors will follow. Being able to look at 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 sizes and quantity of wires per cable according to the needs of the wiring circuit. It is pretty much standard to use 12-2 and 12-3 cable for lights and outlets. This just means that the cable size is a 12-gauge thickness with either 2 or 3 wires in each cable. These 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 big gnarly circuits that use a special cable are ranges and ovens. These take a lot of electricity and they need special range cable which is usually two 6-gauge cables as hot conductors and one 8-gauge cable as a neutral conductor.

The low-voltage systems in home wiring include phone wiring, computer network wiring, and home security systems. These are usually wired with Cat5 cable which is an 8-wire cable designed for communications systems.

Its best to map out electrical circuits in your home using graph paper so you can keep everything to scale. Youll need an accurate floor plan of your home for drawing each electrical circuit. Youll need to make several copies of these plans because youll have many circuit runs.

When you have an idea of where to put the electrical circuits, you can plan out the breaker panel box needs. A standard size of breaker panel is a 200-amp panel with a minimum of 40 breaker slots. All the circuits will start at the breaker box with a breaker or fuse.

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 wiring circuits will be inspected at different intervals during the home construction process. The electrical inspector will make sure all codes have been followed. This helps us feel safe knowing we did the wiring correctly and were not going to catch fire in our sleep at night.

Tags: bathroom, DIY, electrical, electrical wiring diagrams, gardening, h, home construction, home electrical wiring, home repair, home wiring, home-and-garden, home-improvement, home;improvement, home;repair, kitchen, residential electrical wiring

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This entry was posted on Monday, January 14th, 2008 at 1:45 am and is filed under do-it-yourself, gardening. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.