How a Home is Wired

How a Home is Wired

A home is, usually, connected to the power grid by two, very large wires that bring electricity to the house. You can see two large, black wires in the center of the service panel on the right. These two wires are very thick to handle the power needs of your entire home!

From that point, an electrician will connect these large wires to the service panel. This panel has a number of circuit breakers. These ‘breakers’ act as overload protection for the different circuits in the home.  Each breaker is connected to a single circuit in the home. If, for example, you ran two ‘high-load” devices at the same time on a circuit like a blender and a microwave oven, the breaker in your kitchen may ‘trip.’ This means that the amount of current the circuit was using was too high for the wiring and outlets used in the circuit. The breaker ‘breaks’ the circuit which requires it to be manually reset. If a breaker is resetting often without a specific cause, this is a concern and needs to be investigated.

The circuit breakers in your home might be labeled as “kitchen,” “bathroom,” or “downstairs lights.” That means that all of the outlets or light sockets in that area of the house are on the same circuit. If a circuit trips in one part of the house, the circuits in the rest of the house will remain powered.

When working on a circuit, it is important to make sure the circuit is not powered. Electricians will turn off the breaker to the circuit they are working on. Electricians will also test the circuit to ensure the power is off (and that the breaker box is labeled correctly). Like turning off a breaker, your Betabox Electrician Foundations and Futures Hands-On Project box has a way to ensure the circuit you’re working on is not powered. On the Load Center, turning off the Main switch will ensure there is no power in your circuit. But, as with the safety precautions discussed in Lesson 1, it is always a good idea to test before you touch!