![]() He was livid! He also was an employee of our company, so it didn't matter what he thought about.Įvery house we built after that had a live receptacle in every room. I asked him if he could just put a receptacle in each lights switch box and put a breaker in for us, so we had adequate power. He did, however, run a feed wire to each light switch box in each room. When you are running a compressor, saws, lights, etc, that's not enough. When we built a house and he did the rough in, he would give us one hot receptacle to work with. He would also tie the receptacles in a room to a gfi outside receptacle, so if the GFI tripped, you had to go outside to reset it. He would wire the receptacles and the lights in one room all on the same breaker, so if a receptacle popped a breaker you also had no lights in the room. He also wired things stupidly, in my opinion. It looked like a wire job you would see in a housebuilder magazine.īut he spelled bad, so when you looked at the panel, many things were spelled wrong, which doesn't lend an air of confidence. (Think of how this'd turn out if you were wiring this in Chicago, where you'd have to use metal conduit instead of cables.) In fact, you could use a divider in your box between the three lighting controls and the two receptacle devices you'd then need grounding pigtails in both compartments, but it would make it much easier to keep your circuits apart.We had a guy wiring our houses years ago. However, you also must join all the equipment grounding wires involved together and pigtail them off to the box and to the receptacles (unless they are self-grounding that is). Thankfully, premade wire labeling booklets are available for this job, and make this relatively simple all you have to do is come up with a consistent scheme for using them.įinally, even if you don't use the wire labels, you must keep your neutrals on the two circuits separate for the reasons mentioned above. The bottom line is that to answer the OPs direct question - Yes you are perfectly fine having more than one circuit per box. ![]() I can run the wiring for the 4-way switch so it goes to one of the boxes. ![]() Would like to use a RIB, but not sure which one I need. Dont want to use a contactor and cant consolidate to one circuit. You'll also want a consistent way of labeling your wires so that you can tell the various circuits involved here apart crossing your streams could lead to false AFCI trips, overloaded neutrals, and other such badness. A 4way switch has two marked sets of screw terminals where the two wires of. Two separate circuits, one single pole occupancy sensor. As a result, I would go with a 3½" deep box if you are sticking with the field-gangable boxes, or order in a factory-fabricated 5 gang box that is taller and thus provides more fill volume if you'd rather go that route. Remove the panel box cover plate knockout that corresponds to the slot where you installed the new breaker (bend it back and forth until it breaks off). This is just a hair over what your box supplies, and would be legal under the 2017 NEC fill rules as the fill for the additional grounding wires is what pushes it over the top, but doesn't account for any cableclamps internal to the box. Next, connect the second switch to a ground terminal on the circuit board. Attach the black wire from the circuit cable to the other end and the black wire from the cable to the box. ![]() The top terminal of the first switch has a 6-inch wire connected to it. This means that we are using 72¾in³ of fill 36in³ for the 18 14AWG wires, 9in³ for the 4 12AWG wires, another 9in³ for the two receptacles, 12in³ for the lighting controls, and finally 6¾in³ for equipment grounding, as per the 2020 NEC rule that requires an extra equipment grounding allowance for every four additional ground wires past the initial allowance's worth. Prepare two black wires if you’ve mounted two switches in the same electrical box. ![]() You are bringing 4 14/3, 3 14/2, and 2 12/2 cables into the box, in addition to mounting five devices in it, three of which are connected to 14AWG wire and the other two connected to 12AWG wire. This will allow the two wires to be connected to each other without the need for a separate ground wire. Yes, you can - just mind the box fill and labeling, and make sure to keep your neutrals separated!Ī five gang box composed from gangable, 2¾" deep boxes as you describe provides 70in³ of fill (14in³/gang as per the Steel City catalog). Attach the black wire from the circuit cable to the other end and the black wire from the cable to the box. ![]()
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