I hate to give any electrical advice to those without the proper skills, beyond "Call an electrician." Electricity can be dangerous and can kill you! If you don't know anything about electricity, and/or if you have no experience with electrical installations, CALL AN ELECTRICIAN!!!
For those here that can work with wires and just need a few tips on the correct installation of a sub-panel, here's a brief DIY I put together while installing my new sub-panel last week.
With this installation, my sub-panel is on an inside wall of my garage, directly behind my main service on the exterior wall. If you want your sub-panel to be easily removable, mount a piece of plywood on the wall then mount your sub-panel on the plywood. Make sure that the panel is securely fastened to the wall. It should then look something like this. BTW - The panel is plumb - it's the photo that makes it look crooked.)
Here's a closer look at the wiring. Note the isolated neutral bar and the ground bar that was added. The ground bar usually has to be purchased separately, so save yourself an extra trip to the store and buy one when you get the other parts. The panel does have threaded holes and (usually) screws for mounting the ground bar.
This is a receptacle box, before the receptacle goes in. Note how the ground wire is attached to the box with the little green screw. Buy a small pack of those little green grounding screws and use them to properly ground your boxes. It only takes a few minutes longer to properly ground your system and it's well worth it from a safety standpoint.
This is what it looks like finished except for the cover plates and dead panel.
It only took about three hours to install everything and I now have six new 20 amp circuits in my garage. WooHoo!!!
On top of not feeling very verbose today, this work is very simple for me and I don't really know what kind of problems or questions an inexperienced person might have, so please ask any questions you might have and I'll be glad to help out as best I can.
PC
For those here that can work with wires and just need a few tips on the correct installation of a sub-panel, here's a brief DIY I put together while installing my new sub-panel last week.
With this installation, my sub-panel is on an inside wall of my garage, directly behind my main service on the exterior wall. If you want your sub-panel to be easily removable, mount a piece of plywood on the wall then mount your sub-panel on the plywood. Make sure that the panel is securely fastened to the wall. It should then look something like this. BTW - The panel is plumb - it's the photo that makes it look crooked.)
Here's a closer look at the wiring. Note the isolated neutral bar and the ground bar that was added. The ground bar usually has to be purchased separately, so save yourself an extra trip to the store and buy one when you get the other parts. The panel does have threaded holes and (usually) screws for mounting the ground bar.
This is a receptacle box, before the receptacle goes in. Note how the ground wire is attached to the box with the little green screw. Buy a small pack of those little green grounding screws and use them to properly ground your boxes. It only takes a few minutes longer to properly ground your system and it's well worth it from a safety standpoint.
This is what it looks like finished except for the cover plates and dead panel.
It only took about three hours to install everything and I now have six new 20 amp circuits in my garage. WooHoo!!!
On top of not feeling very verbose today, this work is very simple for me and I don't really know what kind of problems or questions an inexperienced person might have, so please ask any questions you might have and I'll be glad to help out as best I can.
PC
What Frank said!
