Labeling Your Breaker Panel

If you have a breaker panel that needs to be labeled correctly then pull up a chair and watch this video. James is about to get into labeling your electrical pane the proper way.
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[@wroberts520]

😂😂 “hung over from the night before” You always make me laugh!!

[@threeleggedman]

I used my late mom's electric sewing scissors to identify my breakers. Taped the button down and put it in a little box and set it on the floor. I could hear it buzzing to tell if outlets were energized or not.

[@abrelectric]

Nice!

[@Southern_Yankee]

A radio turned up loud would be safer.

[@late921]

Thank you! I am selling my house after 14 years and the CO is asking that the panel be labeled. I don’t trust what was done in the past as the house is 100 years old so when I would do electrical work I would turn off the whole house.

[@afeishadavidson7185]

Thank you!!! I've been trying to get an electrician to this for me for months! Now I'm gonna get it done myself😊

[@jcovergaar]

That mystery breaker has another quick check. Open up the front of the box so the wires are showing, and see if it’s actually wired to something or was just stuck in as a future use… and if it *is* wired, do those wires lead off into the wall, or are they possible rolled up and capped off in an open spot outside the actual box, but under the larger metal front panel. Here’s how it happened to us: Home inspector flagged the breaker on a rental property we were buyingas unsafe, using a high amp breaker on a narrow gauge line 110v line to an electric water heater. Seller told us it was fixed. None of us noticed that their fix was putting a 15 amp breaker on the line instead of replacing the wire. My first tenant there never had a problem. Single seminary grad student, rarely used the shower at home, had a daily wake-up-gym -shower routine. If you never used too much of it, it only took a trickle of power to warm up the replacement water and keep the rest warm. Then he moved out after getting a spot on campus, and a young newlywed couple of grad students moved in. Within the first few days I got calls about the water. Quickly discovered what happened. Handyman says “no problem, you guys said you weren’t using the washer and dryer, right?” and told the electrician to just steal that line. Problem solved… until a few years later when I replaced the washer and dryer with nice new ones after doing a renovation on the unit. But while tiling the kitchen and completely rebuilding the old metal cabinetry, we noticed a very large plug behind the gas stove. When we relocated the emergency shutoff for the gas in a slightly more accessible place than behind the presumably out of control stove fire/leak, we found a thick cable (6 or 8 gauge I guess?) with one end leading into the wall towards the plug and the extruding 3 feet or so cut off and coiled up. Then we open up not just the front panel of the breaker section of the box, but the whole thing, where we saw outside the breaker not just 1, but 2 disused 240v wires cut, curled, and terminated. One was to the previously electric stove. The other was to one of the super inefficient electric baseboard heaters, one that had shorted out and been removed before I bought the place. It would have been sooo easy to just fix the water heater correctly in the first place. If only the sellers had bothered to look.

[@dorothywood8498]

Was hoping you'd explain how to match up breaker with lamp, etc.....someone said turn on every light, tv radio, etc....then shut off every breaker...then one by one, turn a breaker on and match it to lamp it turns on....??

[@101hamilton]

This is a very helpful video. Thank you for posting.

[@troydwill]

Loved this video - practical and funny.

[@abrelectric]

I hate labeling panels. Thank you

[@StillThinkingAboutIt]

Great video. 3:45 🤣 I bought a brand new house this past year, and the panel labeling was sooooo bad. It's written with a big fat marker, everything is misspelled and/or completely illegible. How does an inspector even pass that off? I had to redo the whole thing

[@patrickkelly9721]

Recently did this while installing a generator transfer switch. Had a mysterious breaker marked "SD" that seemed to go nowhere. Duh, "Smoke Detectors". Even stranger, have one outlet that always had power. Flipped all breakers one at a time and that outlet was always hot. Guess we don't need a generator. Just use that plug, lol.

[@abrelectric]

Patrick, sometimes those breakers that don't seem to go off are being fed by more than one breaker. Sometimes happens after a remodel

[@ericbourgeois2092]

@@abrelectric is there a reason behind an outlet being controlled by 2 breakers, in my house i have an entire room of lights and outlets that are controlled by 2 breakers.

[@abrelectric]

@@ericbourgeois2092 Many times, post remodel, a circuit is accidentally fed from 2 breakers, on the same phase. One way to handle this, is to see how much territory each breaker covers in addition to the "overlap". You can either disconnect and cap one of the feeds at the breaker or sort it out and find where they are combined in the house. You need to do one of these, so you don't have a backfeed on a breaker at the panel. Basically, you can turn off the the back fed breaker, but the attached wire is still hot.

[@ahmedalzoyed9525]

@@abrelectric That is exactly what I had experienced once a time in service call where a customer asked to change 120V circuit to 230V.

[@rkgsd]

Unfortunately my house has several rooms on the same cuircuts. I will have longer description labels.

[@anonimous596]

none of mine were labeled .... anyway I turned everything off and went through the house 1breaker by 1 breaker at a time -- turn it on and see what comes on. yea took a LONG while! here's some of the "fun" I found: BOTH ACs shared one 50 amp breaker double tapped (fixed now) but air handlers for both ACS also shared one breaker (fixed now) two lights in front of the house had their own breaker. one outlet on the side of the house had its own breaker also smoke detectors also had thier own breaker ....... and loose . wires that had no breaker just loose in the box they are capped now and labeled - turns out they went to the dryer outlet which was diverted to something else (I have a gas dryer so never noticed it did not work..... yea lots of crazy stuff it took me days to figure it all out !

[@DougHanson2769]

What’s Tom Hanks doing on KZbin

[@abrelectric]

Definitely a little bit Forrest Gump;)

[@reasonitout9087]

Great video James. I wanted to label Breaker Panels from the minute I learned to write! No Seriously, I bought a house and it is wired with a 6 circuit manual transfer switch 15 amp button breaker on each flipper switch. The Transfer switch label has things like : TV room, Freezer etc. I am making an Excel " Directory" which shows which txfr switch flipper switch is paired with a particular breaker. Just started and I already found out that they labeled the breakers wrong, or somewhere along the line moved breakers around in the box to make room for my 60 Amp breaker to supply 240VAC to the Tesla wall connector in the garage. So my 150 amp panel is 100 percent allocated. Is there a convention for numbering breaker slots? The sticker on the door shows the left bank lablled on a schematic of the connector block 1 through 16 on the left and 17 through 32 for the right bank. I think I'll use that pattern to make a label for the breaker slots so I have some way to keep track that is consistent with the mfgr numbering of the slots.

[@abrelectric]

Traditionally, you have odds on the left, evens on the right. Do whatever is clear and useful.

[@J.T.Poconos]

Bought a house recently and the labeling on the breaker box is terrible. One says “Bob’s room”. What am I meant to do with that??

[@abrelectric]

Find Bob 😀

[@J.T.Poconos]

@@abrelectric well on the sub-panel there’s another one labeled “Robert’s room” so I first need to figure out if Bob and Robert are the same person! But seriously, the sub-panel was put in when they did an extension to the house and added a few rooms. I have a feeling that the same rooms are labeled on both the main panel and the sub panel. Why would that be? For those rooms, is it likely that the original circuit on the main panel has been abandoned? Or could the same circuit somehow still be linked to both breakers? I am planning more work to the house and trying to identify unused breakers to avoid needing a second sub-panel.

[@abrelectric]

@@J.T.Poconos my advice - ignore the existing labeling, and do your own.

[@leohorishny9561]

What’s your opinion in the Klein Tools circuit finder wand you use at the breaker panel?

[@SavageVoyageur]

Get yourself a Klein breaker identifier tool. It makes this a one man job. Works great if you follow the simple directions. Go over each breaker twice, once to learn, twice to identify the breaker.

[@debor7900]

Please, no offense, why do people do all this unnecessary chatter? Can we just get to the point. Good video, but too much extra