Switched Electrical Outlet Wiring

Mark Donovan of http://www.HomeAdditionPlus.com shows how to wire a switched electrical outlet.

Hi! I am Mark Donovan from homeadditionplus.com and today I am going to show how to wire a switched outlet. One warning before we begin. Make sure you turn power off at the circuit panel and check it at the outlet or switch boxes to make sure that indeed they are off before beginning any electrical work in your home. For a 15-amp circuit I am using Romex wire. This is a 14-2 wire. It contains a white, which is the neutral, a black that is for your hot and then a bare copper wire, which is for your ground. In a 20-amp service, you would use a 12-2 Romex type wire and the same wires but thicker gage for supplying more current to the lamp. For this particular application, we have power coming into the base of the outlet. And from there, we need to provide that power up and over to the switch to the second box and then back to the outlet itself to actually make the outlet switchable. To wire up the outlet, we have power coming in from the base of the box and then a second cable going over to the switch. The first thing we do is we tie the two grounds of the two cables together and then attach it to the green on the outlet fixture. Second, we take the black hot wire coming in from the base where it comes from the power via circuit panel and the black wire associated with the other wire that goes up to the switch, we tie them together with a wire knot. We take the neutral, which is the white wire, coming again from the base where the circuit panel provides the power to the knot on the left hand side of the outlet where you have your grounds sitting in the bottom. On the opposite side, we notice we have a white wire. This is the return coming from the other side of the switch over to the brass side of the outlet. And you will notice we have a black tag like a tape on here. This is to indicate that this is now a hot line coming from the switch to power the outlet itself. You need to do this on both this side of the white wire and likewise on the far end of the white wire over at the switch. The switch side is a little bit easier. We have our one bundle of cable coming in. We attached the bare ground wire to the green knot on the switch and this is a single pole switch. And on the opposite side, we take the black wire and attach it to the top of the switch. In the bottom side, we attach the white wire. And notice, I put a black piece of tape on this white wire. Again, this is to indicate that this is now a hot line that is going back and feeding the line side of the outlet. So we will put this back together and just retest to make sure we are configured correctly. Now with the outlet and the switch reattached to their boxes, we just do a test and you could see the light works. So that is it, very simple to do. If you have any other home improvement questions, visit us at homeadditionplus.com.