Hi all,

I've finally begun pulling wire to the boxes in my basement. I have a question on the very first wire I pulled, of course.

I run from the subpanel to the first outlet. From there, I need to feed outlets in both directions. It's okay to have 3 #12 wires in the box to accomplish this, right? I'm not sure how else I'd do it.

And one more dumb one.

On the plastic boxes, there's a "flap" that you jam the wire through - it rotates open. Can I slip a second wire through the other side of the tab? Or do I have to use another hole. The problem is that with the aforementioned box, all 3 wires come in from below and there's only two holes in the box.

TIA,
Jim

 

It's okay if the box is large enough to avoid a fill violation. Three 12/2 cables with a receptacle in a plastic box requires a box of at least 20.25 cubic inches. The size of the box is stamped in the back. I recommend using nothing less than 22.5 cubic inches for single-gang plastic boxes.

If you do not know how to make box fill calculations, you need another book. Many books on home wiring contain these instructions.

One cable per set of flaps please. Most single-gang boxes have four sets of flaps, so that should be no problem. Route one cable so that it comes in from the top. It should be easy.

No offense, but perhaps you should stop now and read a few more books before continuing. It could save you a lot of trouble later.

 

I have 22.5 CU boxes. I didn't really phrase the question right, I guess. I wasn't worried about overfilling the box. I was wondering if I should have run the cable from the panel to the end of the run rather than "split" the circuit in the middle and run in 2 directions.

The reason I only have 2 flaps available is because the box is directly beneath a low window. I can't get anything in the top of it.

Home Depot's book is pretty good, but as you can tell it leaves out some subtleties.

Thanks,
Jim

 

Can you move the box down a couple inches? If not, split the circuit in the next box over.

There's no problems with spliting a circuit in the middle. It even has certain advantages.

You should always worry about overfilling a box.

 

I'll move the split. The box is already a bit lower than the rest. The Home Depot book explains the calculations - that's why I got 22.5 CU boxes.

Thanks a million,
Jim