I installed a 400W patio heater and wired 240 Volts! YOU make sure to consult a licensed electrician for all your local codes and regulations!
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By: Mehdi Sadaghdar

Hi today i want to install an infrared patio heater for my tiny patio here. Why? Because it's my god-given ride to be able to use my tiny patio in the cold of the night, this area used to be a part of two-car garage. We tore this one down and turned it into a patio and kept one garage so that at least we have a little bit of backyard. The heater will go right in the middle of the roof here, and the problem is that we don't have proper wiring to handle 4000 watts so i'll have to wire it all the way from my fuse box to this spot here without setting the house on fire By the way, if you care about safety, this type of work should be done by licensed professionals.

I do it because i'm confident in my skills, no but seriously, don't do it if you don't know how to deal with this stuff after a bunch of research. This is the heater we bought a 4 000 watts, infrared electric heater. You probably have seen this type. This element heats up and radiates tons of infrared.

That is also reflected from these reflectors and is supposed to be able to heat you up now. If you're thinking hey, you have natural gas here, why don't you buy one of those jazz heaters or why won't you just buy an electric heater and plug it in i'll? Make another video about my logic on why i chose this heater and put it on my meditation channel where i meditate about stuff. For now. Let's install this thing, i don't want to ruin the looks here by running wire over the wood.

It will go behind inside the ceiling and come to the center and drop down to the heater. Fortunately, my joists are running this way, so the wire can come here, but there are some support joists this way at the center, so it should be fine on this side. It doesn't really matter. If the wire runs over the surface, it's a garage anyway, it would run from the fuse panel into the wall there somewhere, and that would be really the only option that didn't need tearing all the drywall down.

What we need now is a bunch of cables which is ac90 or armored cable, which means it has this metal cover, so that accidentally, you can't drill a nail or screw into it and, of course, breakers that match my fuse panel and boxes and switches and stuff. Now you might think fine, we will run some 120 volt lines and power our heater wrong to run a 4 000 watt heater. You would need over 33 amps of current, so you have to rate your system for 40 amps, so some thick wires and 40 amp breaker, which is fine. I guess but 40 amps is a huge chunk of your entire house's current budget.

And why do that? When you can run your system on 240 volts, it's getting warm inside anyway. I have told you that in north america we do have 208 or 240 volt available on 240 volts, a 4 000 watt heater would draw up to 17 amps, which is much easier to supply. I would need to rate my system for 20 amps, so a 12 gauge wire and a 20 amp breaker, but i decided to rate my system for 30 amps to keep more margin and also in case in the future. I need to change this heater to something more powerful should be enough, though, so i have 10 gauge wire and 30 amp breaker power.
The only thing is that, where i bought this breaker they were showing non-stock. So i don't know where they got this from and it has some scratches on so it might be used a little bit suspicious. So, let's see if i can test it and the other problem is that how can i draw over 30 amps from 240 volts to see if it pops, i might have some load in my room? Let's see hey look what i found the shower head of doom. I used in my other video.

It is rated for 5 400 watts of power on 110 volts or 49 amps of current in your shower, which house in the world is wired for this, my entire patio heater is only 4 000 watts. Let's see if i can use it as a load. Look at the heating element it's around 6 ohms on 240 volts. It means 40 amps.

I guess my breaker will pop if i connect it, but i really wanted to test to see if the breaker doesn't pop for currents less than 30 amps. Let me see what i can do. I should say right now. This is dangerous work.

So if you're like me or if you're, not comfortable, doing electrical work, then don't do it. Let me get inside the fuse panel. It is much safer to turn off the house breaker, but then i won't be able to see anything and who's gon na re-tune the microwave clock. As i told you before, these alternating contacts are plus minus 120 volt and their difference is 240 volt, and this thing connects to two of them, so the output would be 240..

How does it go on now like this? It doesn't fit. What in the world is that did somebody just nail right in the middle of my breaker box? Is this live? No? No, let's just cut it and see if my breaker fits yeah and and and what the hell. Ah, there you go now: let's connect my load with some alligator clips. Now, if i connect the other terminal, the breaker should pop right away.

No, what the hell this burnt, but my breaker didn't pop. Was it less than 30 amps or 40 amp is not enough to pop it immediately. Let's choose a smaller resistance. Now i selected four ohms for 60 amps.

Wish me luck. I accidentally connected to two and a half ohms instead of four ohms, so somewhere, like 90 amps and the heating element popped open instead of the breaker. Should i feel safe with this? I think it should be fine. It must have something to do with the i square t rating of the breaker.

You know the more current you draw from it, the faster it will trip. Probably my wire tripped before this guy could here is a bucket of water, and so we are on the same page. None of this is the part of the process. So don't do it, i'm just a scientist trying to understand how long it takes for the breaker to treat before my house burns down.

I still have a 4 ohm resistance left in here, so i'll put this in the water, so it doesn't burn right away and i'll measure. The current too. Here we are, let's see oh geez, it started burning in the water, 70 amps and it still didn't pop. I have to keep it for longer and see when it pops.
Okay, this time, i'm not gon na, let go until the breaker pops one, two three four, my wire popped open. I still have some resistance left ready. One two, my resistor burns open every time before the breaker one more time, even smaller resistor one yeah, it doesn't last anymore. Do these breakers take so long to pop open, or did they sell me a broken breaker, i'm pretty sure, that's how it's supposed to be.

Is it how it's supposed to be? Let's continue. The most important part of the project is for the wire to go above the ceiling of the patio. So let's start there, because if i can't do that, the rest of the project is doomed testing testing one two: three, oh, what the hell! Oh i'm pulling insulation! Now well, the wire has to go in here and we have a beam here and on top it's empty, so i should be able to go in straight above the ceiling. Hopefully i can push through and above the insulation, though okay, let's do it.

Why doesn't it go in? It has gone in for over five feet, though, so this is expected now i have to open a nice and clean square right around here. There you go. The question is where's, my wire. Now i screwed up by a few inches, i'm on the wrong side of the joist.

It's okay, it's garage! I can fill it up later. Ah, there you go. It only took me three hours to pull the wire out now i just put a bracket on it. So it doesn't go anywhere.

I just put the original piece of wood back in place. Now we just nail this piece of wood back in place and there good as new from a kilometer away. You can't even notice it now. We just install these legs on the joists, attach the heater without dropping it pass the wires through the here.

Oh my god. The 10 gauge wires are so tough to bend anyway. I didn't need the neutral. I just needed the plus minus 120 and the earth.

Now i just put the front panel on and there we are i'm done for today. Actually, let's directly connect the cable to the fuse panel and see if it turns on ready there and as expected, it's drying close to 16 17 amps. Let's go check it out. Ah, yes, it's working now i need to do the rest of the wiring hi.

Today is the next day. Let's do some wiring. I was a little bit worried about my breaker, not tripping, so i contacted the manufacturer and they sent me this data. What you see here is the trip curve of my family of breakers.

If i zoom in you see, the horizontal axis is a multiple of the rated current and the vertical axis is time in seconds. So, for example, for my 30 amp breaker 1 means 30 amp. 2 means 60 amps and so on. So if i come up here for 30, amp or 1, it takes a thousand seconds to infinity for the breaker to trip and for any current below 30 amp.

It doesn't trip at all for 2 or 60 amps. It takes between 10 to 50 seconds to trip for 90 amps or 3. It takes somewhere between 4 to 15 seconds to trip, so breakers at home. Won't trip for fast surges of current and in all my tests, the heater element blew open before the breaker had a chance to trip.
So i guess my breaker is fine and we can continue so from the breaker. The wire must go inside the wall and come out somewhere around here at a stud and from there go over the surface. I'm gon na put my breaker down here because it's a little bit crowded up there, so we first somehow pop one of these doors open something like this and then i suppose we have to drill into this stud without shorting anything there we are, then we pass The wire, through the hole geez this thing is metal. It can't short the power lines.

We have to be careful. Apparently the stud is here where the wire has to come out, maybe a little bit further. This way, damn it i should have covered here. This is fine because it's going to be covered with some electric box.

Now we fish the wire through without shorting anything there. We are uh turn it off done on this side. There we are now you might ask. Why didn't i take the wire straight to the heater and cut it here? The reason is simple: i want to install a 240 volt outlet here.

For my future use a bunch of 10 gauge wires are so hard to bend. I install the box sideways, doesn't matter now. We fix the wire to the wall screwing these things into the studs. What do you call these things brackets or everything on my system, including the switch, must be rated for 30 amps and because on 240 volt lines, both of them are live wires.

This switch is a double pole, so it disconnects both lines from the load. My heater doesn't need neutral lines, but i'll pass it along by tying them together anyway, and done the wiring all the way to the switch and to the heater. I guess now we can safely turn the breaker on okay, let's test the switch is off, the heater is off. Now i flip the switch.

The heater is on another success. I guess time will tell if my house will burn down and make sure to check my meditation channel on more information on heaters and if this thing is any good or not have fun.

10 thoughts on “Electric Patio Heater Wiring and Installation”
  1. Avataaar/Circle Created with python_avatars Lenny says:

    Hmm… where I'm living (230 V country), 4 kW would be considered to be in the three phase (400 V) territory… single phase 230 V normally being limited to 16 A max. (or almost 3.7 kW) in residential buildings.

  2. Avataaar/Circle Created with python_avatars Jared Tremblay says:

    You forgot a bx connector in the panel, knockout fillers in the back of the 4×4 junction box and you didn't use any antishorts on your ac-90 connector terminations, your installing a seperate heating load in a home with a/c which are both taken at 100% on a load calculation and on a 100 amp service so you might be overloaded and you require an electrical permit. I would fail your your install. 😞

  3. Avataaar/Circle Created with python_avatars impulsivedata8712 says:

    If you did anything like this in Australia you'd instantly void your home insurance
    Not only that, I'm pretty sure it's also illegal nationwide

  4. Avataaar/Circle Created with python_avatars Bizhan M says:

    I can't understand why the wire coat should be Metal and the boxes he used also needs to be metal and breaker takes this much time to break the power! It is really dangerous system, here in Germany everything is plastic and isolated even Breaker box is plastic, idk why people choose metals for electric work

  5. Avataaar/Circle Created with python_avatars Jonny Boy says:

    The breaker stats really scare me, its designed to trip at 30A but we didn't say what day it would trip! I thought they were to protect the wire from causing a fire. At double the current it still takes 10-50 seconds???

  6. Avataaar/Circle Created with python_avatars playbyan1453 says:

    Lol, if you not sure about the breaker. Try use some power cables rated for 30 amps short it around the breaker.

  7. Avataaar/Circle Created with python_avatars Kapil Rao says:

    Whenever I see this video's thumbnail, I read it as "potato heater" and pointing to Mehdi.

  8. Avataaar/Circle Created with python_avatars Sa Alamin says:

    Why not cover the whole area with glass and make it an indoor sitting zone. It will be warm and comfortable even in the rainy season.

  9. Avataaar/Circle Created with python_avatars Sebastian Morelli says:

    da fak just jumped over my chair with that explosion ! loves and kisses and hugs and nasty things from Argentina !!!!!

  10. Avataaar/Circle Created with python_avatars nass zelle says:

    Your wooden ceiling is going to overheat after 1/2 hour of operation! (or not ?) Pls. show again to avoid doubts of your abilities.

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