About sparkytools

sparkytools is a study-and-reference site for electrical apprentices. It is the material I wish I'd had in first and second year: the circuits you have to understand for a level exam, the words nobody defines for you, and the drills that turn "I sort of get it" into "I've got it".

Why the diagrams are drawn from scratch

Every wiring diagram here is drawn from the electrical relationships up — the switches, the travellers, the load, the return — not traced from a book or lifted off another site. That is slower, and it is the whole point: because the drawing is built from the real behaviour of the circuit, the interactive layer is honest. When you flip a switch, the light responds for the right reason, and the trace follows the path current would actually take.

How to use it

There are four ways in, depending on where you are. Brand new, with nobody telling you what order to learn things in? Take the start-here path — six stages, each one page to read, one diagram to try and one drill to a target streak. Stuck on one circuit a journeyman just mentioned? Go straight to the diagram, flip it until it stops surprising you, then read "what goes wrong" under it. Night before an exam? The drills — run "Do 10" on each one until the summary stops naming things you missed. And in your first months on site, the On the job pages cover the things a course assumes you already know: the meter and its rating, lockout, reading a panel schedule, what the screws on a device are telling you.

What is deliberately not here

Three things, on purpose. Code-book numbers — ampacities, fill limits, box fill, motor full-load values, derating factors, conductor colours. Those are the book's job: they carry conditions, they change with the edition, and a number quoted out of its table is how people apply the wrong one. Where a page reaches one of those, it says so and points at your book. Calculators — this site marks your answer to a problem it wrote; it never computes a value for a job. When you are at the bender, bentright.com does the conduit math; when you are doing a take-off, fieldcalc.net does the material numbers. Install instructions — the diagrams teach how a circuit works so you understand it; they do not tell you how to put one in a house. The code decides colours, methods, permits and permitted arrangements, and a qualified person signs off the work. This site stops at understanding.

How it treats you

Free to use, and supported the way most free sites are: by placements when they appear, and by knowing which pages get used. Here is exactly what that means. Your drill streaks, your best-of-ten and the "most-used" tally on the home page live in your own browser and go nowhere unless you ask them to. The site keeps a first-party count of which pages are opened — its own count, on its own domain. As it stands today no third-party tracker or ad-network script is loaded on any page; if that ever changes because a placement network goes in, the privacy page is where it will say so, and it already sets out what an ad network would be able to do. There is an optional email account; it exists only to carry your streaks and progress between your phone and your laptop, and the site works exactly the same without one. Everything stored is set out on the privacy page, and a note to [email protected] deletes it. If placements appear they will be clearly labelled and will never change a diagram or a definition — the material is the asset, and the day it is for sale it is worthless.

Contact

Corrections and suggestions are welcome — if a diagram is wrong I want to know. Reach the site at [email protected].