The Golden State: Where & How to Live, Secure, Visit, Enjoy and Thrive in California
Practical Electricity And House Wiring
Plan Your Installation
Previous chapters have been devoted to rather general principles, or the theory of wiring; now we are ready to undertake the actual wiring of a house. Before we can proceed, we must know what we want. It must be decided where lighting outlets are to be located; which ones are to be controlled by pull chains, which by switches, and where 3-way switches are to be used. It must be decided where baseboard receptacle outlets are to be located. These things having been decided, a plan must be made.
Symbols.—It is not practical to draw a picture of a lighting fixture where one is wanted; a picture of a receptacle outlet in every location on a plan where one is to be installed, and so on. Instead, standardized symbols are used, as shown in Fig. 118. Note that when the outlet is installed on a ceiling, the symbol is plain round; when installed in or on a wall, the same symbol is used but with a "stub" showing location at the wall.
General Plan.—As a starting point, a plan should be drawn showing all the outlets proposed for the entire installation, as in the typical plan of Fig. 119. No attempt is here made to show how one outlet is connected to the next by wires, except that a heavy dotted line is run from each switch to the outlet which it controls. In your first diagrams it will be well to give the walls actual thickness as in Fig. 119, so that it will be readily apparent on which side of a wall an outlet is to be installed, and so that while practicing on paper, wires can be shown running inside walls, although it is impossible to do so in the illustrations in this book, because of the limited size of a page.
The particular house shown in Fig. 119 to 123 will never capture a prize from an architectural standpoint, but is used because it illustrates in simple fashion typical wiring problems which will be met in wiring other houses.
Wired with the outlets shown it is not entirely up to the usual standards of adequacy recommended in Chapter 9, but adequacy has been here sacrificed for clearness of the pictures. Adding additional outlets in actual wiring is a simple matter. Each outlet in Fig. 119 has been numbered to correspond to the same outlet in later pictures.
Draw Plan of Each Circuit. —Fig. 119 shows all the outlets to be installed in the house, but the outlets are not connected to each other. The service switch with main and branch fuses will be installed in the kitchen, or directly beneath it, from which point wires will radiate to the several circuits. The problem is now to decide which outlets are to go on which circuits, and then to wire these outlets in groups called circuits as recommended in Chapter 9.
