Name: How to Replace a GFCI Outlet - Not Working?
Uploaded: 2024-12-19T17:08:24.000Z
Duration: 4 min 16 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Every GFCI outlet has two buttons, one labeled test and the other says reset.

Adverbs of manner

When you push the test button the reset should actually pop up and that means the outlet is working correctly.

If when you push the test nothing happens, that means the outlet is defective and needs to be replaced.

But many people are fooled because the outlet is still putting out power and it seems like it's working.

So in this video I'm going to show you how to replace a GFCI outlet from start to finish.

Start by turning off the power to the outlet.

You can do that by switching off the circuit breaker, but even if you do this I still recommend checking the outlet with a light to make certain that there's no power on.

Next remove the two screws holding on the outlet cover plate and now you need to remove the screws that are holding on the outlet itself.

Now with the outlet free you can pull it out of the box and see what's going on.

Because GFCI outlets are wired differently than regular outlets and you can easily get it wrong.

These outlets are different because they've got kind of an in and an out, except they call it line and load.

The line is the power going into the outlet and the load can feed other outlets down the circuit.

So in your kitchen you might only have one GFCI outlet, but you could actually be feeding multiple outlets afterwards.

Here's a brand new GFCI outlet and when we flip it over you can see this piece of tape covering two of the terminals and that tape is covering the load terminals because remember the load would be other outlets down the circuit.

We've got the power going into the GFCI outlet into the line terminals and when we flip it over you can see that the load terminals are feeding that other outlet.

And even though it's just an ordinary outlet it is being completely protected by the GFCI outlet because it was wired correctly.

The point of me showing you that is that you need to pay attention when you first pull your outlet out of the box because if you've only got two wires it's a little bit easier because they'll only be connected to the line terminals and you won't remove the tape from the new outlet at all.

But if you've got four wires like I do here, you need to make sure that you're identifying which ones are the line.

Now that's actually easy to do, just look at the existing outlet itself because there'll be a label on it saying line.

And you can't just go by looks and match them up because that old outlet has the line feed on the bottom and the new one has the line on the top.

So now take a look at the back of your existing outlet, figure out which wires are going to the line spots and move those wires over to your new outlets.

You're going to always have two types of wires, a black and a white.

The black is called the hot and the white is the neutral.

The white wire will always get connected to the silver screw and the black wire will always get connected to the brass or the gold looking screw.

Now the nice plus about GFCI outlets is you don't usually have to hook the wires.

They have a clamping type of mechanism that you just insert the wire in and then screw the terminal tight to squeeze it in place.

And if your outlet had four wires, now you can go ahead and pull that tape off and connect up the two wires that are in the load spot.

And then finally you need to move that ground wire from your old outlet to the new one.

Now this original outlet had a hook at the end of it, but the newer style outlet has a clamp so I went ahead and cut the hook off and I just slid the wire right in and tightened it down.

Now with everything wired up, I'm ready to put the outlet back into the box.

As you start to push the wires back in the box, I'd recommend double checking those screws because sometimes when you move those wires around they can loosen up just a little bit.

With everything looking good, now I can put that outlet back into the box and tighten these screws down.

Now I'm ready to turn the power back on and make sure that the outlet is working properly.

Now this newer one has a small LED in the bottom corner.

It's really faint, but you can just see that it's green and if the outlet should break or have a problem, that LED will actually turn red.

But the easiest way of course to check this thing is to now press the test button and with that reset popping up, that means this outlet is working just fine.

And because I had other wires connected to the load end, that means the other outlets on the circuit are now also GFCI protected the way they were intended.

Another great tool I'd recommend purchasing is one of these outlet testers.

These things are under $15, they tell you if the outlet is wired correctly, and they also show you the exact voltage that you're getting out of the socket.

And the real secret behind these outlets is you don't know how many other outlets are on this circuit being protected, which is why it's so important that if you've got a faulty outlet, you get it changed out as soon as possible.

And hopefully you found this video helpful.

 If you did, please give it a thumbs up and subscribe to my channel if you're not already for more videos coming up.