there is no 220V service in my garage - thats about to change.

i picked up a 250V 30A outlet (3 slots arranged in a circle w/ one looking like a "L") which matches the plug on the welder.
i have a 30A breaker that takes up two slots in the breaker panel for the house (located in the garage!)
i have some new 10 gauge 3 conductor wire (black, white, and green conductors).
snap the breaker in place - make sure its switched off.
install a black and white conductor in one of the two set screw slots in the 30A breaker.
connect the other ends of the black/white to the outlet and the ground to the ground on the back of the outlet and inside the breaker panel (metal box).


to be honest here, the only thing i know about A/C electricity is it can kill you. other than that, i don't know jack. i can replace a bad outlet/socket/switch, but i couldnt wire any 110v circuit from the box to the wall if i had to.

so does the above sound right? i know there should normally be a red wire to use in place of the white, but i've read thats really only required for 4 prong plug/outlets.

looking for the FRAXX guidance here oh wise one's.

Sounds about right. Make sure you run the ground lead to the ground/common in the breaker panel. Then, check everything with a volt meter, you should see 116-123 volts between each of the main plug prongs and the ground socket and 220-240 volts between the two main prongs. If so, you're ready to rock n' roll.

You should be on your way!!!

good.
now any advice on running a temp run across a wall from the panel to a spot about 6-10 feet from the panel? i have to go buy wire anyways since the wire i have turns out to be 14-3 and not the 10-2 i need. 10-2 has 2 conductors and a bare ground wire in it, right? should i get get something i can place inside a PVC conduit or soething that comes w/ that spiral metal jacket? i'm not intrested in running it inside the wall.
thoughts?

I ran mine through the studs. If not, I'd put it in a conduit if it's not behind the wallboard. The spiral stuff has been the cause of a few fires in the phone company (the jacket becomes a big heating element in a short circuit condition). Check the local code and use conduit accordingly.

I used metal conduit and a metal outlet box for my outside-the-wall run. The breakouts and the fittings available make it pretty easy to work with. When I looked at the spiral metal stuff, it looked like it would be a pain to work with, and I was also concerned about sharp edges, in spite of the bushings available.

i plan to use the PVC outdoor stuff. thanks guys.

Is you're panel mounted between the studs "in" the wall or is it mounted "on" the wall

between two studs "in" the wall.
i was thinking of knocking out a knock-out plug and going out the top and to the top of the wall. there i will come out of the wall into a "box". conduit across the wall to another "box" and then half way down the wall to the outlet box.

When I ran mine I had about 20' of wire left over that I made into a 220V extension cord - comes in real handy.

this used welder came w/ a 20' plus cord on it. very nice high grade cord and it looks very new.

Not an electrician but I can tell you how I most recently ran my 30 amp 220 and 50 amp 220 in my recent remodel (as I was guided to by my electrician). For 30 amp, I was told to use 10-3. The 10-3 Romex I used has an orange outer sleeve and contains 4 wires. 1- Neutral- white, 1- Red and 1- black (both hot) and 1- bare ground. The way I understand it, any 220 has 2 hot leads and one neutral. What concerns me is if I read what you posted correctly, you are hooking up 2 hot leads to the breaker (one to each of the 30-amp dual breakers) and you are either hooking up the neutral to the ground or you are not using a neutral.... or not using a ground. You should have 2 hot wires (I believe one to each breaker) a neutral (white) to the neutral bus bar and the green or bare goes to ground. Sounds like you are using an ungrounded receptacle (3 prong) which would only have 2 hots and a neutral. If this is the case, you may be hooking the neutral to the neutral bus bar and calling it ground which is ok but you'll not be properly grounded as most current code would require. If you can, I'd get the 4 prong 30 amp receptacle (the 30 amp also has an L shaped prong, the 50's do not) which should allow you to properly ground. You'd have the 2 hots going to the breakers (red and black), the white to neutral bus bar and the green/bare to ground.

Romex can be run through studs and I suggest using the nailing plates to cover them so you don't accidentally find them with a drywall screw, etc. down the road. With Romex, my local code does not require them to be pulled through any metal shielding indoors. Obviously, check local codes by you to ensure you are ok.

Hope this helps.

the wire i have turns out to be 14-3 and not the 10-2 i need. 10-2 has 2 conductors and a bare ground wire in it, right?
[/quote]


14-3 is for lighting, NOT for powering outlets of any type. 14-3 does have 4 wires in it, one neutral/white, 1-ground (bare or green) and 2 hots (usually one black and one red). The way you use it would be to have each of the hots (red and black) support a separate service/circuit utilizing the common neutral and ground. In a sense, this is similar to the way you'd run a 220 circuit like the 30 amp you are trying to run, they should also be hooked up to a double breaker (2 15 or maybe 20-amp breakers bridged together so that you can't kill one thinking you killed the circuit and then cut it only to learn the other circuit was still hot... etc.). In this case however they would be supporting 2 separate circuits (i.e. 2 separate lighting fixtures or arrays of can lights in a kitchen). 14 gauge is way to thin for 220.

10-2 will have 3 wires which are intended for hot, neutral, and ground. 10-2 will not get you what you need for your application. You need 2 hots, 1 neutral, and one ground and 10-3 should provide that for you.

General rule I was told by my electrician-

14 = lighting (usually white romex casing)
12 = 110 outlets/power sources (usually yellow romex casing)
10 = 220 applications- 30amp, etc. (usually orange romex casing)

2nd number depicts number of non-ground wires- -2 is hot and neutral, -3 is 2 hots, 1 neutral. Both will have a ground as well.

Hope this helps.

220V dryers and ovens get a neutral, because they may have a few 110V parts (like light bulbs). That's why they have a 4-prong plug. Devices that are purely 220V (like water heaters and welders) do not use or need a neutral, so welders typically have a 3-prong plug.

I did run a neutral wire in mine just in case I ever need to add a 4-prong outlet for some reason, but it's just capped with a wire nut inside the box.

BTW, the difference between a neutral and a ground is that the neutral is intended to carry load current in normal operation and the ground is not. That's why metallic conduit can be used as the ground but not as the neutral. There may be several volts difference between neutral and ground at some outlets depending on how well the loads are balanced.

Neutrals and grounds must be tied together at the main panel ONLY. They should never be connected at the outlet or in subpanels. So, a main panel may have one big ground bus for all the grounds and neutrals, but subpanels must have separate ground and neutral buses with the neutral bus isolated from the enclosure.

accually the way i understand it is the neutral is not used at all. i use two hots and a ground. thats the way the outlet is set-up. it has two brass colored screws and a green one. most all 110v outlets have a brass and a silver and a green. the silver is neutral. brass is hot.

excatly how i'm gonna do mine.

I AM an electrician and Sean's advice is correct.

I'm not sure what the codes are down there, Glenn, but make sure all the lock nuts and set screws on your fittings are tight when you run it in pipe. Up here in Chicago, the raceway (pipe, greenfield (spiral metal conduit you spoke of), seal-tight, wire mold, etc) is your ground. If you do not tighten the fittings, you have no ground and a very dangerous situation.

In normal residential situations not taking de-rating or special applications into mind, the rule of thumb is:

#14 = 15A
#12 = 20A
#10 = 30A
#8 = 50A

As far as Romex, it's illegal in Chicago and the surrounding suburbs and I won't use the stuff. You're basically running extension cords through your walls, no thanks. On top of that, if it ever does go bad or you want to upsize the conductors, then you're screwed. Time to tear down the drywall.

Out of curiosity, what's the safety issue with Romex? Vulnerability to being found by screws, etc? Curious as I just ran about 700+ ft of it in my recent re-model and I'm about to run another couple hundred feet in my garage makeover.

got it done. usd the black and red to the 30A breaker. connected the white in the panel to the neutral strip and the bare wire to the ground strip. at the outlet i connected the blackand red to the outlet and bare wire to the ground.
used the welder for a bit. works fine.
it has 23 wire in it now. i need to get some 35 in it for stuff like cage tube and then use my 110v welder w/ the 23 or set it up for aluminum.

Other then the typical nail/screw through it, since most builders don't put the nail plates over where they drill the studs:

Circuit breakers are mechanical contraptions that can freeze/rust/stick over time and when combined with Romex can present a dangerous situation. If a splice/device/wire goes bad (or someone decides to plug in 3 space heaters...) and the draw goes up and the breaker doesn't trip, the wire can get hot enough for the insulation to melt off and set the insulation/studs on fire. The chance of this is lessened in conduit because if the wire gets hot enough to melt the insulation off, it will then find ground and be a dead short which will either trip the breaker or blow the wire.

You'll probably be fine since you just wired everything new, but in areas where houses have been around for a long time, these situations creep up and are starting to cause fires.

Conduit makes sense in areas where urban sprawl is happening and people are living in older and older houses. The house doesn't need a complete gutting when technology changes or new devices come out where the homeowner might need more recepts/draw. It makes even more sense in condos/apartments/townhomes. You can just pull new wire if you need more ampacity.

The biggest benefit in my eyes is that if something does go wrong, you don't have to chop the wall to fix it. What is usually pitched is safety since most people don't know more then they hit the switch and it works.

.023 is nice for sheet metal work.

I'm jealous, I still don't have 220v to the garage and run my welder off a generator.

The shoemaker's children have no shoes...

Thanks for the explanation on Romex. The melting wire having the metal conduit as a shield/last grounding resort makes a lot of sense. Hopefully with the way they have codes these days with all the new circuits I installed (one for fridge, one for dishwasher, one for disposal, one for range hood, one for the microwave, 2 for lighting, 2 for outlets in the kitchen alone), seems like I'd be challenged to overload the romex by having it close to impossible to oversubscribe.

Now I just worry about the remaining knob and tube wiring in the rest of the house ;-)

This tread came at the perfect time. I've needed to do this since i bought the new house.

As ironic as this is going to sound, I had an electrical issue at the hotel I'm staying at tonight.

I started noticing a "zip zip" or "bzzzt" sound. At first, I thought it was just the hard drive on my laptop which was on the desk and I was sitting on the bed. Then, my laptop went to sleep and I still noticed the sound but it was coming from the direction of the door. After a while, I noticed it seemed to be coming from the wall outlet. Sure enough, I turned off the lights in the room and could see an arc behind the trim plate.

Yet another irony, I left my tool bag in the back of another guy's truck today so I brought them into my room for the night. So, I took off the trim plate and the hot wire on the receptacle is arcing away and melting the recept. I went up to the front and talked to the desk girl (who likes us, 8 guys from the contractor are staying here). I didn't want to move rooms so I offered to fix it for the night.

Anyway, the issue with the wiring is that the lazy (or unknowing) person who wired this place up didn't bother to pig tail the recepts and just decided to hook and go on each side of the recept. The problem with this technique is that it puts the device in series with the circuit and depends on the device to take the load of everything on the circuit, not just what is on that recept. The other issue that I found is that the convenience recepts for the same room number on different floors (ex. 102, 202, 302) share the same circuit. Therefore, there is the opportunity for 3 mini fridges, 3 microwaves, 3 alarm clocks, 9 lamps plus whatever the renter plugs in to be on the same 15A breaker on #14 wire.

Oh, and I forgot to mention, I found out the whole place is wired in Romex.

Are you glad that the owner of the building was able to save money building the place now that you know some of what goes on? Strict codes may cost more initially, but piece of mind is worth it in the long run. The same goes for the trained craftsmen that build these buildings and know the codes vs. guys off the street with a pair of wire strippers.

Support your local IBEW Electricians and build Union

PS- I used the microwave to make mini pizzas tonight. Tomorrow, I think I'll go to Subway and leave the electrical work at work.

Knob and tube isn't too scary

In some of the old buildings in Chicago, when they were originally converted over to electric lighting from gas lighting, the gas pipe was reused and they just pulled wire through it. Theoretically, this works great because gas pipe is just like Rigid electrical conduit. Super safe!

Well, super safe until you pull the plug out of the pipe to get a little slack in the wire or re-pull... and GAS COMES OUT! Whoever originally did the conversion never seperated the "gas" and "electrical" pipe work!

I'll take knob and tube over that any day, unless there's been a squirrel in the attic chewing on it... which leads me into the next reason big cities need pipe. The mice and rats would have the electrical system in shambles in a few days with as much as they like to chew insulation.

A while ago, the contractor my best friend works for got a job running 6" EMT pipe in a hotel re-model downtown. The pipe wasn't for anything electrical. It was for the beer and soda lines running to the bar from the barrels/syrup bags in the basement. They have to do that otherwise the rats will chew holes in the clear plastic tubing and suck the sweet syrup for all the drinks.

The more you know... (you wish you didn't)

Umm, yeah, I bought my house from a family of electricians. Never do that

Wow, that's intense. By pigtail, does that mean you have a hot, neutral and ground wire already screwed (solidly) into the receptacle and you use a wire nut to join the pigtail and the other up and downstream (for lack of a better term) wires rather than using all the screws on the receptacle to secure the wires? Is that usually a code thing or just a best practice?

Glad you made it out ok and hope at least the smoke detector works in that place.

Correct, that's what I mean by pigtail. The other thing is that wire nuts are just "splice caps". Some wire nuts claim to be able to make a correct splice by just putting 2, 3, etc wires inside then just turning. That's BS, you should always twist the wires clockwise with a pair of side cutters (lineman's pliers, etc) to make your splice, then tighten the wire cap on clockwise to cover the connection. That way, you have a chance of working it hot if you need to and the splice won't open up just by taking the wire cap off.

As far as not hooking two wires on a side and/or terminal, it is best practice always and it is code in Chicago. The same goes for stabbing solid wire in the holes on the back of the receptacle, best practice to not do it and it's illegal by Chicago code. It's more likely to loosen up over time and at that point there isn't anything holding it in. At least by making a hook on the wire (clockwise) and putting it under a side screw, it's less likely to come off even if it does loosen up.

Also, when stripping solid wire (which includes Romex) practice not knicking the wire. A knick in the wire is a pre-failure and if you do have a problem or when the wire becomes old and brittle, it'll be most likely to fail there.

ALWAYS, Hot on top, ground down. - meaning, put the hot wire on the top brass colored screw if mounted vertical or either screw mounted horizontal, the neutral on the lower silver screw if mounted vertical or the opposite silver screw if mounted horizontal, and the ground screw should be down or on the bottom.

If everyone would follow the rules, this stuff would be easy...

Thx for the info. Very helpful. That seems to be what the electricians did with some of the work they did in my kitchen (I did most of it) and I followed their lead. However I'm thinking I may not have followed those rules in the garage and bathroom I'm working on so I'll go back and double check. Good info, thx!

LOL I knew you were a union electrician, you guys all hate romex wire. The city of San Fransisco has some strange rules about romex because the union complained so much. Conduit is the way to go, but nobody is willing to pay for it.

Howdy,

First time I ever heard anything bad (safety wise) about Romex for residential indoor use.

I'm not an electrician, but I've done lots of my own electrical work and tried to get knowledgeable about it.

I.e. I'm that guy on the street with a pair of wire strippers. :-)

Mark

On the shoeless cobbler's kids topic, I screwed up by buying my house from a family of electricians. It LOOKED good, with neatly wired big industrial salvage fuse boxes (three together in the garage), umpteen different lightly-loaded circuits, and 200A service (unusual for a 40-year-old semi-rural house in this area).

The voyage of discovery started, in fact, when I bought the welder and wanted to add a circuit. I couldn't figure out which breaker the washer was on. That was because the 110V washer outlet was connected to one one side of the 30A dryer outlet. No worries, though Even though the wiring was sized for 30A, it had a 50A breaker to handle both loads I also swapped out the 100A slow breaker for the heat pump outdoor unit with a 50A slow breaker as specified on the name plate, downsized the water heater breaker and pulled new wires for it, found a big conduit to Romex junction box with all the grounds twisted together and the pigtail twisted through a screw hole (no screw), and so on.

2 things that I was thinking regarding your application:

Do the most recent codes still allow you to mark a white wire as a hot wire (taped black, for instance)? I think you mentioned using a white as hot in your first post.

Welders I believe are notoriously hard on electrical systems. I would go out of my way to assure good grounds (wire it back to the panel).

All wires must be the correct color up to and including 8ga wire. After that, you're allowed to distinguish with phasing tape. However, I doubt he'll get dinged on a pre-sale inspection (likely the only inspection that would ever take place). Most inspectors (even city/municipality) aren't that thorough.

It is a safety issue to phase one of the hots Black and the other Red. The phasing tape ought to at least clue in the clueless that it's not 110v.



That isn't necessary. The ground will only see voltage and current in a fault situation. The only two conductors that will see anything will be the two hots with 220v. If Romex, make sure your splices are good. If pipe, make sure all your locknuts and set screws are firmly tightened and you're safe... unless you ran any greenfield in the system, then you should run a ground wire as best practice and by code if over 6'.

AC and DC are two different animals when you start talking terminology... which is why I hate talking with electrical engineers and factory reps who's first language wasn't English

I hate Romex, because it's a pain in the ass to add on to in residential. Also, when that solid 14ga wire gets old/brittle and snaps of right as it comes into the box, you're screwed. Time to chop the walls all the way back to the panel or abandon the outlet. I noticed that last night about the hotel I'm staying in. The swipe cards don't work at two of the outside doors. If the problem means new wire, you have to abandon it since no proprietor is going to chop the walls in a hotel for a minor inconvenience like that.

I don't think Romex has any business in Commercial or Industrial work, period. If you run an extension cord on the wall and affix it with the Romex nails, it's illegal because you've just made a temporary product permanent. What makes Romex any better?

No one wants to pay for pipe in new construction because chances are they won't go through an addition or major add-ons while they live there. I can't even imagine doing one with Romex. Good luck pulling new home runs or a sub-panel feed.

People will learn though, especially near cities. The cost of real estate is so high without going 60 miles away that they're going to have no choice but to put on an addition if they want a bigger house. My $.02.

I forgot the 1st commandment of residential re-model work. NEVER BURY A BOX BEHIND ANYTHING! That includes tile, drywall, carpet, wall board, cabinets, etc, etc, etc. I don't want to have to take the tile on your bathroom wall down anymore then you do, so hire people who aren't going to hack it in. Moving the box in the first place is a lot cheaper then tearing down your $5,000 tile wall when your lights don't work.