Red Deer Master Electrician Shares The Rules for Kitchen Circuits
Hey there everyone, welcome back to Lumentek Electrical’s YouTube channel. My name is Trevor, and I’m here with Ryan, Red Deer master electrician. He is the owner and operator of Lumentek Electrical, and they are out of the Red Deer–Central Alberta region. If you guys are looking for an electrician for your home or business, call Ryan at Lumentek Electrical—you can just visit the website www.Lumentek.ca, and they’ll be happy to give you a quote and come out and fix whatever electrical problem you’ve got there.
So today we just want to talk about kitchen receptacles. Okay, so kitchen receptacles—there’s a lot of code regarding kitchen receptacles, and when I say “code,” I mean the Canadian Electrical Code.
Kitchen Circuits
Let’s dive into kitchen circuits. Let’s start off with kitchen counter receptacles. With your kitchen circuits—depends on how the house is wired—but until the late ’90s, early ’000s, they didn’t have ground-fault receptacles. You had a split circuit coming in: two 15-amp circuits, and you break the tab out of the middle of your plug—got your top circuit, bottom circuit, right?
A lot of the time, when people change their own plugs, they forget to break the tab out. When they turn the breaker back on, it’s a bunch of sparks. We get a call: “Sparks and boom, and I—I don’t know what happened, I just put a new receptacle on.” Pretty much, yeah.
Really, depending on how the panel is laid out, you could potentially get— that’s 20, 220 volts right out of that one receptacle if you plugged in top and bottom. Very bad, not so good for you—you can fry different appliances.
But nowadays they’re wired differently. They’re wired with just a single 20-amp—is that right?
“Yeah, if it’s a new house, last 10 years or so, they use a 20-amp circuit on a GFI, and that’s just 120 in there. There’s no 240, there’s no way you can really mess it up, except for wiring your line and load backwards, and it just doesn’t turn on—there’s no sparks or anything with that, it just doesn’t work. So it’s a little bit safer—less scary.”
Then you can also daisy-chain at least one other circuit to that, right? Or one other receptacle, too?
“You can do one more plug—yeah, two plugs per circuit, as long as they’re not next to each other. They have to be frog, yeah, so that you don’t have overloading of the circuit. So you have a blender and an air fryer or something on the same circuit—they just DP the breaker.”
Code Changes
What other things have been changed in the Canadian Electrical Code regarding kitchens? Let’s go through the whole gamut of appliances, receptacles, and power sources for your kitchen.
The first kind of big code change was GFCIs. Really, since I’ve been doing it—since about 2010—they started making GFCI required within 3 ft of a sink or anything with water; you had to have a GFCI. Since then, it’s been changed: now every single plug in the kitchen has to be GFCI-protected.
That’s weird to me— that’s weird to have that many GFCIs in a kitchen, but anyway, moving on. Island plugs need two plugs now—two plugs if it’s over 8 ft long—two plugs, and every other plug has to be parallel-protected now. Every EX for your fridge—and it’s only your kitchen fridge; if you have a fridge in the basement or the garage, it’s still supposed to be AR. That’s insane.
Appliance Requirements
Okay, so what about your dishwasher—does that need an arc fault?
“No, ’cause it’s hard-wired.”
Hard-wired, no arc. Why can’t we just hard-wire a refrigerator?
“You need an arc-circuit breaker. So it’s arc-circuit breaker or arc-circuit receptacle; you can do either by code. I prefer breakers because it’s easier to see if you have one tripped. If you had it behind your fridge, it’d be annoying to pull it out.”
You don’t—FR, sorry—FR don’t have to be… like technically your microwave has to be, right?
“It’s easier to breaker.”
So microwave, you’ve got your dishwasher. What about ranges? If you have, let’s say, a gas range but it has a 120 side of it for the igniters and the electronics—what about that?
“I don’t think so. Okay, I’ve always done it without and I’ve never been called on it, yeah, because it’s not running a motor or anything, and you can’t plug anything in behind there—the oven sits way back. So it’s only for your oven—shouldn’t see any.”
So that’s good—we don’t need an arc-fault for that or a ground-fault. Yeah, there shouldn’t be any. So just the receptacle where people can plug in their toasters and blenders and these types of appliances. Not sure why you need a ground-fault everywhere in the kitchen unless you’re going to have a water fight—like, I don’t know. Don’t ask my questions for code; RS, they just tell you to follow them.
Real-World Call-Out
Okay, so that’s kitchens. You got a call this week regarding that, which kind of sparked our conversation. You had a client who had wired his own receptacle—so they needed to be replaced—and didn’t break the tab off between the hots on the receptacle, and sparks came out. Like:
“Call, yeah, go down to the breaker panel, turn it on—sparks. Oh, crap, what did I do? Here we go.”
So if that’s you, you now know what to do—give him a call and he’ll come and fix it for you.
1970s “Smart Home”
Any other wins this week—what else has been going on? You were telling me about a job where people had a 1970s automation—or I guess smart home. Tell me about that story.
“That was a rat’s nest of wiring, to say the least. That’s the first time I’ve seen that. Basically, the whole house was wired with low-voltage switching down to a relay panel, and then from there to each light.
“What was happening is, they were changing out a lot of the fixtures from the old incandescent fixtures—they’re buying LED fixtures, upgrading stuff—and they just kept saying lights were flickering, or they wouldn’t turn on at all, or they would turn on sometimes, not other times.
“So I went in there, pulled a fixture down, measured voltage, and there was like 60 volts—you should have 120, you should have a high 20 volts, yeah. Then I would sit there with the meter for a second and it would change to like 120, and then back down to like 20— weird. You turn the switch on and off a few times and you’d have proper voltage.
“We ended up troubleshooting down to the relay, and the relay had failed. Replaced that—the light was working. But now they’re having other lights in their house continually doing this because they’re all starting to get pretty old, and so now they’ve got to replace all of those relays. That’s what we recommended, because now, trying to troubleshoot the light’s bad and the lighting system… Instead of a regular switch you just turn on, and if it’s an LED fixture— I mean, probably not the light, right? Probably not, unless, you know, it got over-voltage or something. But it’s hard to wreck one of those things. You can do it with under-voltage, too—yeah, especially if it’s non-dimmable; it’s a non-dimmable one—that’ll wreck them for sure. They’re either on or off, and they don’t dim, so there’s a problem with that.”
Celebright Lighting & Weather
What else has been going on out in the Red Deer area for electrical projects for you?
“Lots of Celebright lights—lots of those. Weather’s changing, so it’s been fun. Weather’s… so you’re out there and it’s cold and it’s snowing, and it makes it more difficult to do, yeah. But, you know, Celebright lighting—people really love those because it helps them for any type of occasion—ads—even just general house lighting right for outside. Just put some kind of warm, warm white light on the outside of the home, and just kind of lightens and brightens everything up.
“It doesn’t use a whole lot of electricity—the whole system for most houses is like 50 watts. That’s nothing. I mean, you can put a 100-watt bulb in—that burns more than your whole Celebright system.”
That’s amazing. That’s fantastic.
Looking Ahead to 2025
So when it comes to—we’re closing out this year, 2024, moving into 2025—what are some goals that you have to improve your customer experience?
“We want to get faster response time for calls. Right now it’s been a challenge just with trying to keep up with everything. It would be nice to have another guy—yeah, that’s a big one we’ve been trying to work on—someone else.”
That’s the challenging thing when you are doing it—you’re the guy who wears all the hats, right? You’re doing the work, you’re also booking the calls, doing the quotes, doing the paperwork, and all of that. Sometimes the calls kind of get lost in the shuffle, and that’s a struggle that’s not unique to you—it happens with all starting businesses. Usually that is solved by having good systems in place and then having another person to really help with the workload, so that they can be doing the physical work and being on the tools while you can be managing the phone calls, customer requests, and quotations and things of that nature.
So that’s something that’s always going to need some work, and you’re always going to be finding ways to have your time bought back by hiring other people to do stuff. Looking forward to that next year.
Anyway, guys, that’s all I’ve got for today. If you are looking for a Red Deer master electrician in the Red Deer area—so Red Deer, Blackfalds, Sylven Lake, even all the way out in those areas—contact Ryan at Lumentek Electrical Contracting, and he’ll be happy to come out, give you a quote, and fix your problem. Talk to you later.
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