Hello All...
My house was built/wired in the 50's and you can tell the old knob & tube guys did it because it's really not up to par and they've used the neutral (white) wire as hot in a lot of places. Of course they didn't mark those hot white wires with black tape either. The house isn't up to code with wiring and there are very few breakers to handle the entire house. They also didn't have as many electronic devices as we do nowadays.
I am working room by room to re-wire the house. I have a 200A service into a nicely sized box and I do have some room for 15A breaker expansion. My first room to be wired is a home gym that I'm making. I ripped out all of the old walls and electrical and have it framed up and ready for the new electrical. The old electrical was actually tapped off of an outlet in the upstairs bedroom. I have outlets at 16" from the finished floor and roughly every 6 ft down the wall. I also will need to put one outlet higher up on the wall to go behind a TV/Radio that I will be mounting. I am also going to be putting in a drop ceiling as high up as I can so I can retain the head room needed from some exercise equipment. To deal with the lighting I plan on using some sort of can lights that can be mounted up in between the joists. This should help me save some head space.
My first question is, is there a height limit to the outlet that I need to put higher for the TV/Radio? My walls are just under 8'. I read somewhere about not going over 6' with an outlet but I wasn't sure if that was residential or not.
Second, do I need to follow the 6' for an outlet rule? The one wall has two outlets because of this, but I don't even need one outlet along that wall.
Third question, what's the height requirement for the switch box? 48" seems a little low to me as that's what I was reading elsewhere for the max height. That's seems to be ADA code however.
Last question, can I put all of this onto one 15A circuit? There should be 6 outlets and anywhere from 6 - 10 of the can lights depending which ones I get and placement. Someone had told me a general rule is no more than 12 "devices" on a 15A circuit. My question comes because of the outlets. They won't all be used at the same time, and I'm assuming I'd be using 2-3 of them at the same time maximum. 80% rule for a 15A circuit is 1440 watts. Do I need to follow this calculation?
Thanks!
