How to Wire an Electric Utility Box
Putting in an electrical utility box is neither hard nor expensive. If you have a do it yourself attitude you can save a lot of money and not pay a professional to have it done. By purchasing the materials and completing the project, you will see savings of up to 80 percent and it will perform as well as if a professional electrician did it.
Items needed for installation:
- Electrical utility box
- Utility knife or a box cutter
- Adjustable wrench
- White electrical tape
- Measuring tape
- 3 breaker panel wires
- 3 service entry wires
- Use the measuring tape to measure the distance from your electric providers entrance to the utility box and from the breaker panel to the utility box. You will need a set of three wires for each measurement. Using these measurements cut a set of wires for each and add 2 feet for each set of wires. (The gauge of these wires must be according to your utility box amperage rating.)
- Name and place labels on the three wires in each set as service entrance wires and breaker panel wires. Generally, the electrical provider wires will be the longer of the two sets of wires. Separate the two sets for installation.
- Using the white electrical tape wrap both ends of one wire in each set. These will become the neutral wires.
- Take the utility knife and cut off about one inch of the insulation from the ends of all the wires in both sets.
- Look into your meter box. There should be six lugs inside that are located two vertically (one on top of the other), two more to the left (one near the top and one near the bottom), and the last two to the right at the top and bottom.
- Place the electrical providers neutral wire into the bottom center lug and the other two into the lugs located left and right of the center lug and using your wrench tighten while holding in place.
- Do the next set of wires to breaker panel box in the same method you just did in the last step using the unused lugs in the utility box.