Finishing Electrical

Michael Holigan: Electrical finish-out is really just installing your outlets and your switches and your light fixtures. There's not a lot of things you have to watch for because a building inspection will be monitoring very closely due to the dangers that might occur with electricity.

Now you do need to come in and check and make sure that you do have all your outlets and switches available to where the electrician can get to 'em. Occasionally a sheetrocker will rock right over it forgetting to cut out. You want to make sure that all your openings are there, so count before they sheetrock your house and then go back and count afterwards and make sure they're there. If you don't see it, you're going to have to find it and you need to find it right now. One other thing is, if you want to add a switch or an outlet now that you see the sheetrock up and it looks a little different, go ahead an do it now. They can still cut the sheetrock and come back and patch it. It will be much easier than when they come in and wallpaper or put a tile backsplash, like in this kitchen that we're in. Occasionally you will find a few that missed where they were supposed to be. And you'll just have to come in and cut out around the cabinet or they're going to have to go ahead and move the outlet, depending on the countertop that they've installed. The most important thing on the electrical finish-out is the smoke detector. Make sure that you have one in every bedroom in your house. You want it hard wired in, but you also want a battery backup. That way if the electricity ever gets knocked out in a fire, this smoke detector is still operational. Plus, make sure they're interconnected. That's one smoke detector is connected to the next on, to the next one. That way if one goes off on one end of the house, they'll all go off. You really need that on a smoke detector. Also, watch for elevation changes. In this bedroom we have one. If this bedroom's eight foot high here, we go out into the hallway, it's 10 foot high. If there was a fire out on this end of the house, the smoke goes up first, so it'd be awhile before it got to this smoke detector. So make sure anytime there's a high elevation in the house that you have a smoke detector there.

The number one area where accidents occur in the home is where and electricity can come into contact. Now that's generally the kitchen and the bathrooms. The laws have changed to help prevent that from happening and the new building codes require a ground fault circuit interrupter to be put in the electrical outlets. That's an outlet that shuts off whenever an electrical appliance hits water. It does it before the breaker box out in the garage or the outside of your house has time to shut off. This protects you and your family from being electrocuted any time an electric appliance is near that water. If you move in to a home and the power doesn't work around any of the wet areas, first go to the GFCI, hit the test and then the reset button to make sure that the power's not just turned off at the plug. One last place you'll find a ground fault circuit interrupter is in the garage on the common wall, that's the wall between the garage and the house. It controls all of the outlets in the garage. In case you're ever washing a car or the rain's blowing in with the garage door open, you won't get shocked. This also is attached to the other ground fault circuit interrupters in the house. In case you have a problem there, come on out and check this one also to make sure that the power's on.

Episode 021 1995 - 96 Season

| Electrical Finish Out | Meter Reading | Chimney Caps | Plumbing Finish Out | Freezing Pipes | Aerator Cleaning | Ragging Off | Relative Assistance | LIST |

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