Hi! I'm Mark Donovan from HomeAdditionPlus.com and today I'm going to show you how to wire a switch outlet combo circuit such as the outlet itself is constantly powered down. Before beginning any wire circuit or whatever, I want to make sure that you really need to turn off the power to the main circuit breaker for the electric box that you’re going to be working with. Otherwise, you may risk injury of shock or even death.
As you can see here, I have power coming into the bottom of the box with a little feed power to the switch outlet circuit. In addition, I have a Romex cable coming from the light fixture itself into the outlet box.
First thing I’ve done to wire my switch outlet combo circuit is I’ve tied the bare copper wire or the ground wires together associate with the power coming in and the Romex cable wire coming in from the top of the box. I’ve twisted them together and attach to green wire on it and I’ve made a loop at the end of the copper knot. This will actually attach to the green screw on the switch outlet box.
In addition, I’ve taken all of the white wires, the two other wires from the power and the white fixture wire, tie them together and I’ve also added pigtail wire, again a white wire with a loop at the end of it.
In addition, in regards to the power fig, I’ve taken the black power fig and attach to pigtails to it, black pigtail wires with again loops at the end of them. The secret to wiring a switch outlet circuit such as the held in itself is constantly powered is to remove the brass tab that connects both the terminal one and terminal twos together on the right of the outlet. You’re going to use a screwdriver to break the tab off and when you’re done, you got basically two independent circuits to wire out.
First thing that I can do is attach the ground wire to the green screw on the switch outlet. The next thing I'm going to do is take one of the pigtails that are tied together with the line powerfig, the black wire coming from the bottom of Romex cable and attach it to the brass screw on the switch outlet. I could put the loop such as this in a clockwise direction so that when I tighten up the screw, the wire wraps around the screw and has a solid connection.
The next thing I’ve done is I’ve taken the second black pigtail associated with the power fig coming in from the cable in the bottom of the electric box and attach it to the terminal screw that is (Audio Cut) itself. And then I'll tighten that up with a screwdriver. So that in fact what we’ve done is I brought power into the brass screw to feed power to the switch and in addition I brought the second black pigtail wire into the outlet terminal to bring power separately to the outlet.
Now, for the white wires, I’ve taken the white return wires associated with the power Romex cable and the white wire coming from the light fixture itself and I twisted them together again with another pigtail and this pigtail is going to attach to the silver screw on this switch outlet circuit. And again I put the pigtail on such a clockwise direction so I tighten up the screw, the wire will snuggly wrap around the screw and without the risk that it will become loose.
And the last thing we need to do is take the black wire associated with the cable coming from the light fixture and attach it to the upper black terminal that’s adjacent to the switch itself. This is such that when we power the switch on, current will flow from the supply line on the brass screw through the switch and basically to this terminal and feed power up to the light.
So now that we’ve wired up the switch outlet combo circuit, we’ll now move on to the light fixture. So for the light fixture itself is very easy. We just take our black wire attach to brass screw and tighten up with our screwdriver. And likewise, we take our white wire attached to the silver screw and twist it, tighten it up with our screwdriver.
And that’s all really to the light fixture. Now, mount the light fixture to the outlet box and we’ll attach the switch outlet to the electric box and we’ll be ready to give this a try.
So now that we’ve powered up the circuit outlet. First, try to be able to see if we can start it on. And as you can see the light fixture is on yet the light fixture overhead didn’t start up, pull the switch and you can see the overhead light fixture is now turned on and as you can observe, the outlet is constantly powered. So that’s it for wiring a combo switch outlet circuit such as the outlet is constantly powered.
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