single gang boxes

I recently wall mounted our bedroom TV. Naturally, that left both the AC cord and data cable hanging down the wall. That was totally unacceptable so I put a new box up high behind the TV, put the satellite receiver there too.

In order to provide AC to the new box I daisy chained off the duplex outlet in the old box. That box was single gang - new one is double, AC and data - and a shallow one at that. The old box already had two lines going into it and my new one made three. That means three 12 gauge lines...six individual wires plus a pig tailed wire nut for the additional three ground wires. I'm telling you, I had a heck of a time getting all that stuffed back into the box.

My question is, is there a right way to get all that into the box? Some methodology of arranging the wires maybe? I always hate using brute force, worrying about shoving a ground into something hot or maybe breaking the grounds' wire nut.

Yes, I could have replaced the old box with a new, deeper one but I didn't have one handy and didn't want to make a 20 mile round trip to get one. Even if I had one it would have been a pain...cut off the nail holding the old box, hope there was enough slack in the feeds to get into the new box, hope the hold-in tabs on the new box don't fall off. before getting them tightened...like that.

Reply to
dadiOH
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IDK of any special tricks, but the essence of your problem is that per NEC box fill, the box in question is too small for all the conductors and the outlet that it contains. You're not supposed to put 10 lbs of stuff in a 5 pound bag.....

Reply to
trader4

buy some spare boxes they are fairly cheap and replace your existing box ASAP.

I keep spare stuff around that saves valuable time if your in the middle of a project

Reply to
bob haller

This. You can get gangable metal old work boxes that are 3.5" deep which a re really what you need for this, alternately deep plastic Carlon old work boxes. The shallow ones are near useless when you use the more recent box fill calcs.

Also, if you have data and 120VAC in the same box they should be separated with a divider. Really I think what you're looking at to "do it right" is opening the wall, putting the 120VAC in a deep 1900 box with a mud ring, an d putting in a low voltage single gang ring to finish that opening.

nate

Reply to
N8N

Couldn't use one of these?

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Reply to
willshak

Yeah, but he said he put AC in the box. With Air Conditioning, it should be able to handle more.

Reply to
Ed Pawlowski

The trick to stretch a box is to abandon the receptacle and put a blank cover on it. You can then add another cable and still end up with the same wire fill count. (you count the current carrying wires as one each, times the wire size factor) but all grounds are counted as a total of one wire. You count the receptacle as 2.

Reply to
gfretwell

Yeah, I've done that in the (recent) past, just didn't want to mess with a new hole and getting a box this time.

Thanks.

Reply to
dadiOH

The heat ducts for the second floor run inside the wall where my TV is mounted so I couldn't add any receptacles up behind the TV.

I used the wide flat cable channel (4th one down on that page) and painted it to match the wall. With the DVD holder and other items on the AV equipment cabinet below the TV, only about 6" of the cable channel is visible.

Works for me.

Reply to
DerbyDad03

Sure, I could have used a chase of any kind, just looks better without.

Reply to
dadiOH

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