Replacing a burnt out outlet with your own hands
Replacing an outlet is usually much easier than installing a new one, as there is no need to choose a location, wire, or cut a hole. You just need to buy a new outlet, dismantle the old one and replace it.
Dismantling the old socket
Dismantling begins with a power outage with packet switches inside the house or on the street. If the bag is on the stairs next to several neighbors, you need to determine which of them de-energizes your apartment and only then turn it off.
Even before turning off the power supply with the indicator, you need to determine and remember which side of the outlet the phase wire is located, and after it is de-energized, it is advisable to make sure once again that the voltage in the outlet still no. We do this by alternately inserting an indicator screwdriver into the holes of the socket and observing if the LED is on, indicating that the voltage has not disappeared.
Then we do this:
- Unscrew the fixing screw with a screwdriver and remove the outer cover of the socket.
- On the sides of the socket housing, we find screws that press the spacer lugs that fix the socket in the box. We release them and try to pull the insides out.
- On the outlet pulled out of the box, we find the clamping screws of the wires, which can be 2 or 3, and unscrew them one by one, throwing the wires back. There will be 3 wires if the line laid to the outlet provides grounding.
After cleaning the box, checking the wires and their insulation for integrity, dismantling can be considered complete and proceed to installing a new device. But it happens that you are going to install a new socket with a grounding, and there is no ground wire. Naturally, he will not appear just like that and you will have to do something. All the subtleties of how to make grounding look at https://electricvdome.ru/zazemlenie/zazemlenie-v-chastnom-dome.html, which even shows how to make and check a ground loop.
Connecting a new outlet
To replace the socket, you will need some of the tools:
- insulation stripper;
- Phillips or flathead screwdriver
- pliers.
The new outlet must first be disassembled by separating the decorative cover from the insides. Then you should slightly strip the ends of the wires to be connected from insulation. In order not to leave the wires exposed, we do this exactly as long as the core enters the terminal of the new outlet.
Next, you need to figure out which of the wires is zero, phase and ground. Usually the color of their insulation helps with this:
- phase - brown (sometimes white, red, gray, black);
- zero - blue or light blue;
- grounding - yellow-green.
At the stage of connecting the wires, the main thing is to understand where to screw the ground wire. It is usually attached to the center pin. The easiest way to find a grounding contact is to use a pair of protruding “horns”.
When the ground wire is already securely pressed with a screw to the contact, we connect the phase wire to the right contact, and the zero wire to the left one, tightening the screws well to avoid heating the socket in the future. But even if you change the phase and neutral wires in places, nothing terrible will happen and this is not rare. The side of their connection is not strictly regulated and often for an electrician it is a matter of ease of installation.
Now, carefully, avoiding twisting, we fold the wires connected to the outlet and put it into the socket box so that it becomes flush with the wall plane. Then we find the bolts of the spacer legs and with their help we evenly fix the socket in the box, avoiding distortions and strong displacements on the sides.
In the final part of the installation, we fasten the decorative panel. There is a temptation to tighten the screw as much as possible, although, in view of the fragility of the panel, this should not be done, and it is not responsible for the strength of fixing the socket. Its task is only to hold the lid.
Next, we turn on the packet switches and use the new outlet with pleasure.