I need electrical wiring help

[SearchMaster]

This is for a small boat dock. When I first got the dock, a knowledgeable contractor hooked it all up but he's not an electrician. It's never worked properly...

In a nutshell, this is what I have:
In - White, Black, Bare
Lighting circuit - White, Black
Receptacle circuit - White, Red
Light switch

The lighting and receptacle circuits use the same shared 3 wires (white, black, red) - obviously they are not connected to the In wiring yet - that's what I need help with.

There is a single 20A breaker in the box.

I have a basic knowledge of electrical wiring, and I'm not afraid of it (though obviously respectful), so I would rather do it myself rather than call an electrician.

My thought was that all the white wires should be connected, with the black In wire on one end of the breaker and the light switch and red from the circuit on the other end. Then the black from the circuit hooked to the light switch, but this didn't work. I realize this configuration doesn't ground but the ground terminals on the receptacles are not used.

Any suggestions?

 

[NL5]

Dude, that is totally effed up, especially if it's on a dock. You have no ground. You need a ground - and a GFI.

 

[SparkyJJO]

All white wires together.

Incoming black with the red wire to the outlet, and to the one side of the switch (wire nut + pigtail it).

Black wire to light go to other side of switch.

There are no ground wires? Bad idea, but at least have a GFCI outlet there, being outdoors/around water.

 

[SearchMaster]

I'll get a GFCI, though I'm more concerned with the lighting than the electrical. I'll also consider rewiring the dock to utilize the ground - there are two circuits (from either end of the dock), and one is pretty easily doable and the other would be a lot of work. I guess I could just disconnect that one and not use it at all...

I don't know why it's wired the way it is, but I bought the dock used and that's how it came. Maybe the previous owner took the easy way out.

 

[SearchMaster]

Originally posted by: SparkyJJO
All white wires together.

Incoming black with the red wire to the outlet, and to the one side of the switch (wire nut + pigtail it).

Black wire to light go to other side of switch.

There are no ground wires? Bad idea, but at least have a GFCI outlet there, being outdoors/around water.

What about the breaker configuration?

 

[waffleironhead]

Incoming, power goes to a box.
black goes to the breaker,white goes to the ground bar, ground goes to ground bar.

From the breaker, black goes to the switch,from switch to the light,from light run white back to the ground bar in box.

from breaker, run black(or red) to outlet, from outlet run white back to ground bar.

Use a gfci in box.

all grounds should be run into the grounds at light/switch/receptacle.

Are you running two breakers or are you running two hots from one? I am not sure on code of this, but is pretty common from a diy perspective, and as long as you do not overload the amp rate you should be fine.

 

[SearchMaster]

Originally posted by: waffleironhead
Incoming, power goes to a box.
black goes to the breaker,white goes to the ground bar, ground goes to ground bar.

From the breaker, black goes to the switch,from switch to the light,from light run white back to the ground bar in box.

from breaker, run black(or red) to outlet, from outlet run white back to ground bar.

Use a gfci in box.

all grounds should be run into the grounds at light/switch/receptacle.

Are you running two breakers or are you running two hots from one? I am not sure on code of this, but is pretty common from a diy perspective, and as long as you do not overload the amp rate you should be fine.

I'm not sure exactly what you're asking.

There is a breaker box on the land, and it feeds the Incoming into the dock's breaker box. It feeds the white/black/bare I originally described.

On the dock itself, there are basically two identical circuits, each with a single receptacle and two lights. Each of those circuits has three wires - white, black, red. The white feeds the lights and the receptacles, the red feeds the receptacles, and the black feeds the lights. And there is a light switch.

With regard to Sparky's original response, that's exactly how I had it wired except the breaker was between the Incoming black and the red+switch. The problem may be that the tool I was using to test the receptacle circuit was grounded and obviously the receptacle was not, though the lights don't work either. I'm think I'm going to take the suggestion to ground one of the receptacles and disconnect the other altogether (because it would be a PITA to ground).

I couldn't find my circuit tester so I was using the tool to suggest the receptacle and I also have a simple voltage tester.

 

[Demon-Xanth]

Generally:
White=neutral
Black=hot
Bare=ground
Red=switched or the opposite phase

Without knowing how it's physically laid out,if you're going to keep a single circuit it would ideally be like this:
After going through a GFCI breaker...
Run the hot to all of the outlets and lights.
Run the neutral to all of the outlets and the light's boxes (not to the lights themselves)
Run the ground to all of the outlets and lights.
Run a pair of wires from the switches to the lights, tie one to the light's neutral, and the other to the neutral run into the light's box.

 

[DrPizza]

Originally posted by: Demon-Xanth
Generally:
White=neutral
Black=hot
Bare=ground
Red=switched or the opposite phase

Without knowing how it's physically laid out,if you're going to keep a single circuit it would ideally be like this:
After going through a GFCI breaker...
Run the hot to all of the outlets and lights.
Run the neutral to all of the outlets and the light's boxes (not to the lights themselves)
Run the ground to all of the outlets and lights.
Run a pair of wires from the switches to the lights, tie one to the light's neutral, and the other to the neutral run into the light's box.

Absolutely not. You don't put the switch on the neutral. That leaves the light energized when the switch is turned off - an accident waiting to happen by someone who doesn't suspect it's live. i.e. you're replacing a lightbulb and the bulb breaks free from the base. So, you turn the switch off, thinking that now you can handle the rest of the bulb. ZZZZZPPPPT.

OP, it would help a ton if you could draw a diagram in MSPaint or something. Also, there's a possibility that there's a GFCI breaker in the main panel that feeds the subpanel at the dock. GFCI breakers are more expensive than GFCI outlets; one reason most of the time a GFCI outlet is used. (And other outlets downstream are protected by that first GFCI outlet.) I don't have a clue what code requires around docks, how many amps the feeder is to your subpanel, nor how large of GFCI breakers they make that could be in the main panel.

 

[SearchMaster]

I took a better look at the 'main' panel on the land. I think it might indeed be GFCI...at least the breaker itself has a "test" button which I haven't seen on a normal breaker before (only on GFCI outlets).

Here's what else I found - the main land panel is taking its hot feed (black) from the house and feeding both the white and black that go to the dock - in other words, both white and black at the dock panel are hot - no neutral. I'll take a picture when I can and post it and try to put together something illustrating the rest of the configuration as well. I'll have to avoid the ticked off wasps who've built a nest inside the land panel though

And to answer DrPizza's other question - the land panel has a 20A breaker as does the dock panel. It appears that the land panel is fed 'normally' (black=hot, white=neutral, bare=ground) from the house.

 

[seemingly random]

Is your life insurance up-to-date? How about liability?

If you're not competent with electrical wiring on dry land (you're not), pay the money for an electrician. You will be kicking yourself if you or some kid gets electrocuted.

 

[DrPizza]

Here's what else I found - the main land panel is taking its hot feed (black) from the house and feeding both the white and black that go to the dock - in other words, both white and black at the dock panel are hot - no neutral.

Definitely would need a picture on that one - doesn't sound like the type of mistake that any contractor would make. Electrical wiring isn't that difficult; but knowing what's code & what isn't requires some knowledge. At least (thankfully) I believe you can finally look up code. Used to be that it was copyrighted or something & it cost a fortune to purchase a copy.

 

[WTT0001]

220v line? are both the black and white run from the same breaker?

WTT

 

[SearchMaster]

Originally posted by: DrPizza

Here's what else I found - the main land panel is taking its hot feed (black) from the house and feeding both the white and black that go to the dock - in other words, both white and black at the dock panel are hot - no neutral.

Definitely would need a picture on that one - doesn't sound like the type of mistake that any contractor would make. Electrical wiring isn't that difficult; but knowing what's code & what isn't requires some knowledge. At least (thankfully) I believe you can finally look up code. Used to be that it was copyrighted or something & it cost a fortune to purchase a copy.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure now that the land panel had a bad GFCI breaker.

 

[BoomerD]

I was gonna recommend a qualified electrical contractor...and that it should be properly inspected by whatever government agency you have that deals with such, but your profile shows you're in Alabama, so I guess you can do whatever gets you by in your 3rd world nation.

 

[Paperdoc]

OK, whites are all Neutral, bare is ALWAYS ground (NOT the same as Neutral), and both black and red can be used for Hot. In your case the cables going OUT of the box each are the same - one each black, white, bare and red. And they are set up so reds go to receptacles, and blacks go to lights. The box has a feed of black, white and bare, plus a breaker and a switch to control lights.

Within the box there should be a screw terminal (often on the back) for the Ground. Take all of the BARE wires, twist then together tightly so they make good contact, leaving at least one of those wires a bit longer than the others. Wrap that longer end around the Ground terminal at the back of the box and tighten the screw so that the box itself is grounded. Push the twisted bare wires to the back of the box, out of the way of the rest of the terminals and wires.

Now take all the WHITE wires and twist their ends together, using a wire nut connector to ensure the connection between them is solid and insulated. This is NOT a Ground and should NOT be connected to the bare wires that are the real Ground.

Before going further, consider replacing the breaker with a GCFI. It looks a lot like a breaker - in fact, if you look at it closely, the unit you have may already be a true GCFI! Why? A breaker will trip and kill the power feed if its capacity is exceeded by a short circuit or overload. A GCFI monitors the current flow in both Hot (black) and Neutral (white) lines to be sure they are always equal. If there is enough of a difference (which can happen with a modest electrical leak caused by water in the wiring, or because you touched a bare wire while standing in a wet puddle and are being electrocuted right NOW!), the GCFI will shut off the current to protect you even though the current is not at the max allowed by its breaker function.

Anyway, black from the input feed goes to one end of the breaker. If it's a GCFI, look closely at the instructions or labels to see if the hot supply MUST go to a particular terminal - it usually does. You are not supposed to make junctions between wires by using the screw terminals on a breaker or switch, so prepare three pieces of black wire each about 6" long with both ends bared. One piece connects to the breaker output terminal (on a GCFI it may be labeled "Load"). To the other end of that, using a wire nut, connect BOTH the red wires and ONE of the short black pieces. Other end of that black piece goes to one terminal of the switch. Third black piece comes off the other terminal of the switch. Now you take the other end of that last black piece and, with a wire nut, connect to it BOTH of the black leads that are in the cables leading out to the lights.

So now you have all Grounds connected together and grounding the control box. Separately you have all Neutrals connected together. The Hot supply to the dock goes first to the breaker (or GCFI) that protects the whole dock system. Then its output is split in two ways. The two Red leads that feed the receptacles are connected to Hot so they are always on. The two black leads that provide power to the lights are both fed through the switch so they go on and off together.

 

[SearchMaster]

Update - I finally got some time to mess with this, and now all is right with the electricity on the dock. There were a couple of problems - whoever wired up the breaker originally had inexplicably grounded the "panel neutral" wire from the GFCI breaker - I'm glad we never grounded ourselves and touched the breaker box. In addition, as I'd suspected, the breaker was bad (maybe because it had been misconfigured all these years). I also grounded one of the outlets and disconnected the other (grounding it will be a PITA and I don't need it), and voila - everything is working properly. I bought a GFCI outlet tester and it indicated everything is correct as well. It turned out well last night as my wife brought the boat in late and the lights came in very handy.

 

[Paperdoc]

You were right to fix the odd grounding connection. Looks like the previous person misunderstood that function. In USA and Canada (and many other places, I'm sure) we use a "Grounded Neutral" system. That means that, both at the breaker panel in the house and outside at the transformer, the Neutral line is connected to the same true Ground (e.g., a water supply line buried outside in the earth) as the bare "Bonding" or Ground wires. BUT those are the ONLY places where the two are connected. Anywhere after your panel they MUST be separate so that the true Ground (bare wire) circuit normally has absolutely no current in it, and hence is a true Ground at zero voltage with respect to the earth. The Neutral line, on the other hand, does have a small voltage on it by virtue of the current flowing in it (back to the panel Neutral bus) and its non-zero resistance. So, although a quick voltmeter check might show the voltage between Neutral and Ground to be "zero", it is not really, and they must be kept separate. At the dock's breaker box, the bare lead from the house cable is true Ground.

I'm intrigued that you have some trouble achieving Grounding of the outlets. On re-reading your post I note you don't say the cables with White, Red and Black running from breaker box to outlets have any bare neutral wire in them. Is that so? There certainly should have been bare neutral wires in them to provide a reliable Ground at the outlets, but maybe the original installer used an odd cable. Or maybe they snipped off the bare wire, planning not to use it for whatever reason. Either way would have been wrong, but maybe consistent with their misunderstanding of Neutral and Ground showing in the breaker box.

 

[SearchMaster]

Originally posted by: Paperdoc
I'm intrigued that you have some trouble achieving Grounding of the outlets. On re-reading your post I note you don't say the cables with White, Red and Black running from breaker box to outlets have any bare neutral wire in them. Is that so? There certainly should have been bare neutral wires in them to provide a reliable Ground at the outlets, but maybe the original installer used an odd cable. Or maybe they snipped off the bare wire, planning not to use it for whatever reason. Either way would have been wrong, but maybe consistent with their misunderstanding of Neutral and Ground showing in the breaker box.

First of all, thank you (and everyone else) for your great response earlier - very well-written and clear. It confirmed that I had the proper approach to this problem.

There were no bare ground wires running around the dock wiring system itself. There is one running from the land breaker panel (the GFCI one) to the dock breaker panel but it was essentially unused within the dock wiring system itself. The wiring running around the dock (through conduit) is just three wire romex without a ground wire - they didn't snip it at all, it just wasn't included in the original wiring. The now-grounded outlet is only about 6 feet from the dock's breaker panel, so it was fairly easy to disassemble the conduit and run my own bare wire through it to ground it. The now-disconnected outlet is probably 15-20 feet from the dock's breaker panel, and runs through 3 different sections of conduit, so getting it grounded will be somewhat of a chore (which is why I just disconnected it altogether).

The wiring on the dock was "inherited" - I bought the dock used and it was pre-wired as-is. The wiring on the land breaker panel (the GFCI one) was the one I had paid a contractor to install (obviously he did a poor job).

For everyone who chided me to get a contractor in to do the job - I appreciate the sentiment and believe me, the last thing I want to do is have a safety hazard. I am the type of person who loves to learn new things, and I learn by doing much better than reading. I also don't just jump in and do anything dangerous and haphazard...I try different small iterative things, test and re-test, and figure out what is wrong. If I get in over my head, I call in a professional and call it a learning experience. I learned a lot from this experience, and have a great sense of personal satisfaction in having diagnosed and fixed what was wrong myself. I also had my brother-in-law come in and review it (he's a building contractor but not an electrician) and he said it looks good. It will also be reviewed by an electrician next month when we have our dock permit renewed (has to be done every 5 years I think), but I saved myself a few hundred bucks by doing it myself and learned a lot in the process.

 

[Paperdoc]

Oh, I missed the conduit thing. Is it metal conduit or plastic? If it is metal and all the fixture boxes along the way are metal, then that is your ground. Metal conduit piping, tightly connected into each metal device box, provides a fully acceptable ground system, which could explain why there was no bare Ground or Bonding wire. But of course if it's all plastic stuff, the separate bare lead is needed.

I'm with you on the learning to do it, with expert help as needed. For house wiring, I stated years ago when we bought an old house and I rewired it. I bought and studied the full electrical code book plus the DIY guides provided by the local inspection authority, then sought advice from real electricians sometimes. Finally doing the whole house job was the last learning stage, confirmed by proper inspections by the authority. Since then I've done the wiring for four rented retail store locations plus updating some stuff in our house. This is all basic 120 / 240 VAC stuff, so I know my knowledge is limited to that. For example, I saw posts a while back about how to supply a higher-current outlet to a garage for use by an arc welder, and I saw that here are special code requirements for that about which I know nothing. But if I had to, I could learn!

 

[Paperdoc]

Oh, I missed the conduit thing. Is it metal conduit or plastic? If it is metal and all the fixture boxes along the way are metal, then that is your ground. Metal conduit piping, tightly connected into each metal device box, provides a fully acceptable ground system, which could explain why there was no bare Ground or Bonding wire. But of course if it's all plastic stuff, the separate bare lead is needed.

I'm with you on the learning to do it, with expert help as needed. For house wiring, I stated years ago when we bought an old house and I rewired it. I bought and studied the full electrical code book plus the DIY guides provided by the local inspection authority, then sought advice from real electricians sometimes. Finally doing the whole house job was the last learning stage, confirmed by proper inspections by the authority. Since then I've done the wiring for four rented retail store locations plus updating some stuff in our house. This is all basic 120 / 240 VAC stuff, so I know my knowledge is limited to that. For example, I saw posts a while back about how to supply a higher-current outlet to a garage for use by an arc welder, and I saw that here are special code requirements for that about which I know nothing. But if I had to, I could learn!

 

[SearchMaster]

The conduit is plastic and the boxes are metal, so there was no ground whatsoever within the dock wiring itself originally.

Now for my ignorant question of the day - there's no problem/danger with just my bare (unsheathed) ground wire running inside the conduit is there? When I grounded the one outlet, I just took some romex I had laying around and pulled the ground wire out of it, and ran it from the breaker panel, through the plastic conduit, and into the outlet box.

 

[alkemyst]

First I would test each wire coming in and verify what the colors at entrance mean. Then I'd verify at each terminal end to see if it's still the same.

Once you have that then the rest can start to be addressed.

 

[Squisher]

Originally posted by: SearchMaster
The conduit is plastic and the boxes are metal, so there was no ground whatsoever within the dock wiring itself originally.

Now for my ignorant question of the day - there's no problem/danger with just my bare (unsheathed) ground wire running inside the conduit is there? When I grounded the one outlet, I just took some romex I had laying around and pulled the ground wire out of it, and ran it from the breaker panel, through the plastic conduit, and into the outlet box.

No. Just make sure each metal box is grounded.

 

[Paperdoc]

There is absolutely no problem with bare bonding (ground) wire in a conduit. In fact, that is exactly what the pro's do when running several individual wires in a conduit. The bare one is Ground (bonding). That's an easy color code to recognize (none!) and it ensures the conduit, if it is metal, is grounded. Well, in many places if the conduit, device boxes and everything are metal and properly connected, they don't even use the bare bonding wire - they just depend on the conduit itself to be the bonding (ground) connection. With plastic conduit, you MUST supply a bonding lead, usually bare. If you look at the service entrance wiring (the supply from the poles) on many houses in places that use Grounded Neutral wiring, you will see that there usually are two black-insulated wires entering the conduit coming down the side of the house, and one bare wire. That one actually is the Neutral of the supply. But since it is grounded both at the transformer and in your house breaker panel, it can be uninsulated.