Installing 220v Outlets in the Shop - Easier Than You Thought

So I'm about to do one of the dumbest things a YouTuber could do, which is talk about electrical. But I will have you know, this is something I've done many times before, and I'm not going to show you how to follow code. I'm not going to answer code questions. All I'm going to answer is how easy it is to install 220. It's one of the easiest type of electrical to install. And I know electrical could be very intimidating. If you look here carefully, they have to cut that tiny bridge. But I'm going to show you for the person who has their own shop. If you're not, you know, I would always consult a licensed electrician, have a licensed electrician do the work. But I guarantee you can save hundreds of dollars doing this yourself. And for a lot of people, that's the difference between buying materials and working in the shop versus just paying somebody else to install an outlet. So let me show you how I do this. So this is your standard electrical box. This is one that is a little bit more typical of a commercial building because it has three phase power. But a lot of homes will have two that come in that are 120. And so this is where your neutral comes in the white, and then black, red and blue are all hot legs. Those are 120. Sometimes you'll get a low leg that'll read 108. But that's okay to use as well in a 220 outlet. But I've tested these, these are all 120. This is where my ground is. And so the way to be safe is I've already shut off power to this box, the way to be safe is to test it. So I've got my black probe on the ground. And then I'm going to go through and test every single one and see it's reading zero, zero volts, zero volts, and test the neutral just to be safe. So now I know that all of these are not on. So this is a tool pole breaker. It's a 120 to 40 volt 10 kilo amp 20 amp breaker. And the way that it works is it clips into this side here. And then these two are going to connect each one of these is your 120 leg. So each one of these metal things that you see is 120. And so the way to put this in is you need to have one that is to this is a regular household breaker, you can see it's double as wide. And you can see a household breaker only has one clip on this side, which is why they call it a two pole breaker. And again, electricians of YouTube, feel free to roast me in the comments for everything I'm saying wrong. But the way it works is it just clips in like this, and then clips into your hot connectors here. And then I always start with it off and flip it on when I go. But one of the reasons why 220 is so easy to install is you have a ground and now I I've installed three 220 outlets, my ground runs through each one. But you just have two wires, and each one runs 120 volts. And so what's great is the difference between a 120 motor and a 220 motor is an electrical wave is like a sine wave, it goes from power to no power, power to no power, and these run opposite each other. So your motor always has contact. And of course, this happens by the microseconds. But when you're doing a 220 outlet, it's so simple, it's a ground and two 120 wires. And so you cannot mess these up, there's no correct order to put them in. As long as you hook the green up to the green in the outlet and these to the other two screws, it doesn't matter what order you put them in, which is why 220 is so easy to install. So the way it works is you just pick any of these I've been doing red on the bottom. Just a reminder, our power is off. So I'm using 12 gauge stranded wire, which is what I like to use because it's a little bit easier to pull with fish tape through conduit and you just screw it in, make sure it's nice and tight. So the thing you know about a 220 outlet is it can only be one per breaker. So we're going to go ahead and make sure those are nice and tight. Now I'm going to take it and make sure that it's clipped on over here. So now you'll hear it click. Boom. And now it's in there. Sometimes what people make the mistake is they think it's clicked in, but it's not. And then when you go to put your box, it falls out and that's dangerous. So just make sure that those are really in there. And now here's my ground wire that I've ran for all three of my 220 outlets. And I'm just going to pick any one of these grounds, stick our ground in just like that. And there we go. It's done. So let me show you what I did here. So we've got three quarter inch conduit. I used a pipe bender to kind of make it work and fit into the shape that I needed it to. I used all drywall anchors and these clips here. You also anchor the boxes. You'll see there's these green ground screws you can buy. It's good to ground one of the boxes in your line. So if you're only running one outlet, you would run your ground just to the ground screw and then to your outlet. And as you can see here, all outlets are going to have a green screw and that's your ground. And again, then it doesn't matter which order you red or black. You want to make sure you're using red and black for the most part because those signify hot wires. White is usually neutral, so you don't want to use white if you have it. But you can see what I did here was I ran, this is where the ground wire runs out of the box. It runs here and then it comes off into three wires and then that ground runs to all three of my outlets. So everything's drywall anchored in and screwed to the wall. It's nice and tight. So we're going to go ahead and just put our boxes together. And the outlets I'm using are the 20 amp 250 volt. You can use the 30 amp 250 volt as well. That's up to you. It doesn't really matter. So here's the note that I left on both of the boxes. I wasn't, the boxes are so far from my office that I wasn't sure which box it was. So I turned them both off and I left a note taped to the main breaker that has my phone number on it. It says electrical work in progress. Do not turn on. I'm going to fire that up and take the note away. Put our power back on and we want to test and make sure we did everything correctly. So first thing we're going to do is take our black probe, put it on our ground and test and see that our power's back on. As you can see, we got 120, 120, 120. So now our breakers are still off. So we're going to make sure that nothing's weird about that. We're just going to test all of those, make sure they're still staying zero. These are all hot. See, you can see these are all 120. So then we're going to go ahead and flip these on and make sure nothing weird happens. Okay, great. So now that we flipped all our breakers on, we want to make sure everything's hot. So we're just going to touch the nut in the back there. Make sure everything's 120, 120, 120, 120. Okay. So it looks like we did everything correctly. The last thing you're going to want to do with the front of your electrical box is make sure that you have the correct ones punched out. And that's real easy. Just take a pair of pliers, just like that. 220 outlets come in a lot of shapes and sizes. There's some that looks like this. There's some that look like the twist lock. I recommend the twist lock. They're just easier and it's easier to deal with them, I believe. So we're going to plug that in and give this a test. Everything works. So electricians of YouTube, double tap that dislike button and tell me how disgusted you are about my terrible non-licensed work. People at home, please, 220 is not that easy, but be safe. Make sure your power's off. Stay safe in the shop. Have a wonderful day. Please like, comment, and subscribe. Talk to you soon.