How To: Add a New Outlet
- March 9th, 2010
- Posted in House / Projects
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I’ve been wanting an electric outlet in my basement and in the stairway for quite some time so last night I decided to try my hand at being an electrician. I am generally intimidated by projects that involve tampering with devices marked “HIGH VOLTAGE” but after googling “how to install an electric outlet” I felt like I could pull it off on my own.
The first, and also the most intimidating part of the project involves adding a breaker to an electric panel. Since my house is extra cool, it has no less than 5 electric panels, 2 of which are no longer functioning. I chose the one under the kitchen to connect to since it was the closest to where I wanted to put the outlets and it also had 3 open slots.
Once you’ve added a new circuit breaker and all the connections are made, run some wire from the panel along the ceiling towards the target location. If you need to get over some duct work, use a 10′ piece of conduit to pull it through. If you’re in a pinch and don’t have conduit handy, a broomstick, scrap piece of lumber, or in extreme cases, a broken tree branch might all get the job done. Just ask yourself, “how would a redneck do this?”.
Take the conduit you just used to fish the wire across the ducts and cut a short section to run up into the location of the outlet. Attach the outlet box to the wall and run the conduit through one of the pop-out openings on the box. I chose the bottom. If you do this step before fishing your wire across the duct work you’ll be out of luck so don’t get trigger happy and start skipping steps.
If you want extra outlets, you can make it easy on yourself and connect them all one after another. There weren’t any (functioning) outlets in the basement so I decided to add one here. The post I attached it to is pretty rough so the outlet looks stupid and not very straight, nonetheless, it has electric current so I’m happy. Once it’s firmly attached, spray paint a random yellow squiggle mark on the post so everyone knows how awesome you are.
Back in the stairway I have now installed the receptacles and used my cool electrical meter thing to test it. You could also use such things as a fan or radio to see if the outlet works, but if you want to feel like a real electrician I suggest using the meter thing. I got mine at wal-mart for $1.50. Also, putting the receptacles upside-down as required by many building codes eliminates the 1 in a billion chance you could somehow electrocute yourself by getting a flat piece of metal to connect the hot and neutral terminals while something is plugged in.
Done! Now you have one more location in your house that is capable of running up your electric bill.
This post makes me laugh. Also, thanks for indicating on that one picture the puppet location.
I think your basement will be less creepy with lights, which will make the “puppets here” sign slightly less menacing…
Oh, and good job not electrocuting yourself. High five!
Nice job. I’ve considered installing a water softener and replacing the springs in my couch. Let me know when you put up step-by-step projects of how to do those 2.
One other item you could use to “fish” the wire through conduit and around things would be called a “fish tape”. How odd is it that the place I ran electricity to in my shed, I had painted a cool yellow squiggly line there to show how awesome it was…….not really! Ha!
How many times have i’ve been to your house and in the basement for that matter and don’t know where any of these pictures were taken except for the puppet room of course.