If you are curious, the national electric code is freely available on the website, albeit in a slow and page by page online viewer. Equipment manufacturers will also often give installation manuals that can be reviewed and combined with the NEC for a decent understanding.
Ugly’s and other companies do pretty affordable handbooks or small books that summarize electrical info/calculations, or wiring methods from the code.
But overall, national code standards are written in blood, and the NEC is made through the NFPA, National Fire Protection Agency. Their intentions are to prevent fires, and that guiding principle leads to code changes.
Fubarberry@sopuli.xyz 1 day ago
As an electrician, it’s difficult to give electrical advice over the internet.
First of all, you don’t know how capable someone actually is at doing work. There’s both a knowledge and a technique requirement for quality work. Bad electrical work can easily cause house fires and death, if I tell someone online how to fix an issue, and they electrocute themselves or burn down their house, I’m partially responsible for that.
Second, it’s hard to give good advice on how something should be done without seeing it in person. Small details that are hard to get from a description or image can change how stuff is required to be done, and the code is complicated and has lots of exceptions and different requirements. Also different areas have different code requirements, and different AHJ requirements, so fully accurate advice has to come from an electrician in your actual area.
Final thing I’ll mention is that getting qualified as an electrician is hard. Getting a full electrical license where I live requires 8 years of experience (4 years being directly supervised, then 4 years of light supervision). You also have to pass a pretty difficult exam, electricians usually spend 6+ months studying hard and taking training classes for the exam, and then it still has an abysmal pass rate and normally takes many attempts to eventually pass. Ultimately after all of that (8 years, months of focused study and classes, multiple test attempts), 25-30% of people are never able to pass and get their full license.
With all that considered, I’m happy to give advice to other electricians online. If they’re already certified I can have some confidence that they have the knowledge and skills to do a good job with any advice given. However trying to give actually good, responsible advice to someone who is uncertified and a complete unknown on terms of skill/knowledge/location with only a partial knowledge of their problems and setup, it’s hard. It’s much easier to recommend they just get a licensed electrician from their area to take a look at it.