I confess, for a handyman like me, YouTube has been a godsend. I think it’s fair to say I have watched over 3,000 YouTube videos of folks showing me how to do this or that.
However, since I got into this work by working with an electrician, I have worries about all the non-electricians who are posting videos on how to work with wires.
Even though I have studied electrical for six years, and I could at this point wire a house if I were to build one, I still don’t like to do electrical work for clients. I mean, I will diagnose, but again, there are just too many variables for me to mess around with it and risk someone else’s house.
Here’s the thing, if I open up a box and everything looks kosher, ok, I MIGHT swap out a switch for a dimmer, or replace a cracked receptacle. But this is ASSUMING that the box and all the wiring upstream going to panel is fully proper and kosher and nothing strange is going on. And even then . . .
The problem with wiring is that you can’t know who worked on it before you. And that’s where the YouTube videos made by non-electricians make me crazy. There are so many things that can be done wrong by amateurs. These YouTube videos are often made by DIY’ers who are sharing their own home-grown intuitive approach. One guy showed how he tested to see if an outlet was energized by plugging in a table lamp. Ok, in a perfect world, that might work. But what if the lamp is not coming on because because of a loose neutral wire? (That means the “hot” wire is still energized. YIKES.) What if it’s a “half hot” outlet and the bottom half of the receptacle is still energized? YEESH. And there is so much more to look out for . . . the polarity might be reversed; there might be a bootleg ground; the neutral wires might be connected to ground in a subpanel; you might have a neutral wire switch, or a maybe a 20 amp breaker on size 14 wire; and so on.
If you know for a fact that only licensed guys did the wiring you are working on, and it was inspected and passed by the city, ok, then the info in the YouTube video might be all you need. But can you really be totally sure?
The real reason I am writing this is, if you decide to do some electrical work on your house, even just re wiring a lamp, take some time to learn about hots and neutrals and get yourself a multimeter and learn how to use it. Discover just how much you don’t know. And don’t rely on any one single YouTube video, they consistently neglect to cover every variation you may encounter. My big complaint is that these videos always make it sound simple. This can lead to overconfidence, and that overconfidence can be genuinely lethal.
