Sometimes breakers go bad. So in this video, I'm going to show you how to quickly and easily swap out a breaker in case you need to do it yourself. If this is a job that you don't feel comfortable with, I would highly recommend that you contact a licensed electrician. They can take care of the job for you quickly and easily. The first thing you need to do is cut power to the breaker panel itself.

So you'll need to flip the main breaker off, which will kill everything in the house. Now, I've got lights set up to be able to record this, which is why everything's still lit up. But this basically shut off everything in the entire house. What? Yes, I know.

I warned Caedmon. Oh. So in order to speed this job up, because my kids are in the middle of a Fortnite match, I'm going to show you what to do. Now that the power is off, we can go ahead and safely remove the panel cover. So I'm going to do that now, and close this.

Recommend you do this with a manual screwdriver. Whoever did this last use a power screwdriver, and they tightened everything down way too much. There's no reason that needs to be that tight.

Once the panel is removed, you still need to be careful because there's still power coming into this box. So with this main breaker here, you can see these two huge wires up at the top. Those are live still, because that's power coming in from the electric company. So that's coming off of your meter. So you want to make sure that you avoid that no matter what.

The other thing then is all these breakers are shut off. So this is the area that we want to work in is down here. We do not absolutely want to touch anything up above.

So as you can see here, there's still power coming in this box. So it's important that you be extremely careful. But down here, you can see that none of these have power. So I'm just testing this with this non contact voltage tester just to be sure that everything down here is off. And it is.

So this is the breaker that we need to replace, this is the one that's bad. All we have to do here is we need to unscrew the screw that's inside here to release the hot wire.

Pull that out. It's also possible to have a breaker with more than one black wire. The ones with a single wire are called a single pole breaker, and they also make double pole breakers. In this case, you'll have two black wires running to your circuit breaker, and you'll have to remove both of those. It's also important to keep track of what wire goes to which side.

So that way, when you replace the breaker, all of your documentation, the label on the panel itself will be accurate and not reversed. If your breaker has a white wire going to it as well. That means it's a special type of breaker known as either an AFCI or GFCI breaker. In this case, you'll have to remove the white wire as well. And there should also be another wire coming off of the breaker itself that looks curly.

In this case, you'll need to remove the wire from the neutral bus bar in the breaker panel itself. Before you remove the breaker. Now, keep in mind, this wire is connected to the panel and it's permanently attached to the breaker. So don't try and remove the curly white wire from the breaker itself. So in order to remove this, all you have to do is pull this side forward.

There's a clip here that's clipped into this bar in the back. And so once this is released, then you can take this entire breaker out. So I'm just going to rock it from this side. Pull it this way, and then I can pull this entire breaker out here. There's a little clip that holds it on this side, and so that's why you have to pull it this way, but that's basically it.

When it comes to choosing a replacement breaker. There are a lot of different types and styles, so it's important to choose the right one. The first thing you need to be aware of is the amperage rating. This is either typically 20 or 15 amp breakers. You'll see this printed on the top of the breaker, and it's important to make sure this matches with the type of breaker that you're replacing.

You'll also need to match up the replacement breaker with the brand or the manufacturer of the panel that you have in your house, because not all brands are compatible with each other. If you have an older house and older panel, you might have to buy a replacement breaker from a manufacturer that didn't create the breaker panel itself.

To reinstall a new breaker. Then all you have to do is clip it here again and then push it back in place. Once that's done, all you have to do then is reattach the wire, get the wire underneath the screw terminal here and I'll take a picture of that so you can see what that looks like better.

And then once it's in place, just screw this back down, tighten it down, and you're good to put the panel back on.

Once the panels back on, then you just have to flip the power back onto the breaker and you're done.

Now the panels back on. All we have to do is flip the main back on and we're good to go. Hopefully you found this video helpful. If you did be sure to like this video and subscribe to the channel, and I will see in the next one.