How to Upgrade House Wiring

Replace Fuse Box

• 1

  Contact your power company and have it turn off the power to the house. Remove the power company leads from the fuse box, label all circuits and unhook the wiring, and replace it with a circuit breaker panel. .

• 2

  Make sure the neutral bus is connected to the ground bus, then connect the ground bus to a grounding rod pounded at least 8 feet into the ground. Use 10-gauge or thicker ground wire.

• 3

  Connect the red and black service leads to the brass bus bars and the white lead to the silver one. Have enough circuit beakers on hand to connect all the circuits in the house to the panel.

Retrofit House Wiring

• 4

  Replace all obsolete wiring with three-wire plastic-sheathed house wire. Follow a logical strategy, replacing each circuit in turn and connecting the wire to a circuit breaker of the correct rating for the circuit.

• 5

  Join all wires in covered electrical or junction boxes. Always make sure to connect wires of the same color: black to black, red to red, white to white and ground to ground. Attach the ground wire to any metal electrical boxes you use.

• 6

  Replace all receptacles with polarized or three-prong receptacles and connect the ground wire. Use Ground Fault Current Interrupting (GFCI) receptacles in bathroom, kitchen, basement and outside locations according to the local code requirements.

• 7

  Make all wire connections secure by removing 1/2 inch of insulation from coated wires and hooking them firmly to a nut or twisting them together and screwing on a wire connector. Remember that black and red wires always connect to a brass nut, white wires to silver and ground wires to green.

• 8

  As you finish each circuit, connect it to the panel by attaching the white wire to the neutral, or silver, bus and the black wire to a circuit breaker. Then snap the breaker onto the hot, or brass, bus and label the circuit to identify it. Any 220-volt circuits powering the stove, dryer or other machinery will have an extra wire, colored red, that must be connected to a separate circuit breaker.