 Numbering systems and using them to your advantage when working with a schematic and converting to an actual wiring diagram is something that is extremely useful out in the field and is something worth investigating. So what we're going to do is I'm going to open up a circuit here and we're going to just have a very simple push button start, stop with a starter and overloads and all that fun stuff and we're going to work through how many wires end up in the pipes or rather how many wires go to each device. So here I have a very simple push button circuit, I have my stop switch, my start switch I have a starter, sorry, my contactor, motor starter I have three overloads, we're assuming this is a three phase system so you'll have an overload for each line and then I have my auxiliary hold in two, three contacts, whatever you want to seal in, whatever you want to call those contacts which are associated with M. So when M energizes, these contacts will close, hold the circuit in and run. Down here is I have the physical devices, so I have a disconnect switch, a nice switch here which is going to be for my power circuit bringing power down to my motor then I'll have my power come through to here and you don't see them but you'll have the contacts that are being controlled by the M and we'll go through down to the motor and then I have my control circuit so right here I have the stop switch which is this right here I have my start which is right here, I have my M coil which is right here I have my seal in contacts which is right here and I have my overloads I've only drawn it as one in this circuit here but you can take the same idea because they're in series so one side will be one side of the overloads here, this side will be to the other Now what we do with these circuits is the first thing is you get your schematic drawn up and schematics are nice because they show you exactly how a circuit works electrically but not how it's wired but we can use the schematic to actually wire up our systems so what we need to do is we need to number our circuits out so I'm going to show you how to do that right now so you notice I've got a number here I started with one which is an obvious number to start with and when I come to this node I name anything that's attached to that wire the same number so one is here, one is here and I get to a node and when I hit that node I switch numbers so I now go to two, two comes to here and here's the tricky part is two also comes down to here because they don't have an actual node or a device so electrically this point, this point and this point are all the same electrically so therefore they're going to be the same number two, two and two on the other side here we do the same thing with three I have three because we've got something breaking it up here we've got a switch and we've got some normally open contacts so I have three, three and three down here the next number would be four so four comes because I have this device in the way then I start a new one with four which gets to my overloads and then there in the way so I get to my five and five is attached to the top here so my control circuit is being controlled by one and five which can be aligned to line voltage or aligned to neutral depending if you're using control transformer or not and we've got all our other devices numbered up then we go to our physical actual reality and we go into our starter here and what we're going to do is assign numbers to each one of these as well and we'll take a look at what happens from there first off we're going to number up our stop one and two that's one and two so we put the numbers physically there and when I'm out in the field I physically throw some stickers on there just because I find it helps or I just write it in pencil close by but one and two is one side of it I look at my start switch or start push button two and three that's two and three there so I just label those two and three moving right along I see that my coil is three and four so I go to my coil in my starter and label it three and four now down below I have my holding contacts or my auxiliary contacts those are labeled two and three so I label them two and three inside my starter and like I said I've got my four and five even though I have three here I'm just going to count them as one across here so four on one side five on the other and the last thing is where are we getting our one and our five from depending on how you've got your circuit laid out but often times you could have a control transformer in your starter or you're taking line to line voltage which should just be off two of the three lines coming into your motor contacts so we're going to put the one and the five in the starter contact itself as well now next thing I do when I'm working this out is I'm going to throw up a number sign a bunch of numbers off on the side here I'm going to use them as a check mark or a check and balance to make sure that everything is covered now if I'm trying to figure out how many wires are coming down through my pipes and going to certain devices you can be guaranteed that from the disconnect switch if we're dealing with the three phase system I'm going to have three hots coming through to my motor starter here and that will then go from my motor starter out to my motor so I'll have three in this pipe and three in this pipe that's my power so what I'm going to do there is just quickly add a couple of hash marks on there so I'm going to just go okay I know where I got one two three I've got one two three going down there so that takes care of that next up we need to start figuring out the wires that are going to this device here because we need to get from our starter to our push button and at this point it's a game of basically connect the dots I have a one here and a one here which means I need to get a wire straight through from that point to that point I have a one here and a one here so what we're going to do is I've just got to pull a wire through that conduit so I just put a little hash mark there just to remind myself the next thing I do is I make sure I check off one over here that way if I get caught up in things or I trying to figure things out or I get distracted I will always know that I've got one done it seems very obvious and very simple for this circuit but when you deal with this system in a larger control circuit it's very easy to get things missed so we'll take two we've got a two here we've got a two in the push button and we've got another two in the push button that means that we're going to have to put an internal connection from two to two but what we're concerned right now with is getting that two from this point to the starter to this point in the push button so that means we're going to be pulling a wire there so we put a little hash mark in there no other two so we check that off then we're going to go to three I have a three here and I have a three here so what we need to do is get a wire from this point to this point so we're going to just pull that through so we mark off our three and again we check that off to make sure that we don't have to go back and get ourselves confused then we've got four I don't have a four in the push button anymore I do have a four inside here I'm going to have to make a connection from four to four that's going to be an internal connection within the starter itself and then five I have no five at the push button station I do have a five at the overload and then a five from my power so again an internal connection at the motor so I can check both those off with confidence that four and five have been taken care of so we basically have taken care of all of our wires so we can go ahead and count them up we have three power wires coming from the disconnect down into the starter from the starter down to the motor and then we have three control wires running from the starter over to the push button station now this is a very simplified circuit just being a single push button start-stop but this will work every single time no matter how complex the circuit is you just make sure you number it up and then you take your numbers and you put them into the actual device itself and then it's just a matter of getting wires from number to number