Adding A Neutral Wire To A Light Switch - How To

hi James would beat one our smart home comm in today we are going to show you how to add a neutral we're going to show you this because we get this question a lot because people want to add a neutral wire for a smart light switch I'm going to show you the wiring diagram how you need to wire that up and how it would work in your home but before we go through all that it's really important to know that there are smart light switches that don't require a neutral wire so you don't have to do all this work but you can because some of you like to do it the hard way and some of you won't want to use the light switch I recommend even though it's a good light switch just because you might have your own personal preference or you want to use a different light switch for whatever reason if you don't have a neutral wire in your light switch box you can use the Lutron cassette outsmart light switches and they will still work without a neutral wire which means that they're going to work with pretty much any home in the US for wiring and you don't have to add a neutral wire you don't have to do any of this work so we'll put a link to those below this is no means in endorsement or advertisement for them other than they are good quality switches but it is an easier solution than adding a neutral wire most of the time because typically it means you're gonna have to open up walls or that you're gonna have to run new wiring through conduit so now we will show you how to add a neutral wire and what that means what I've got drawn here is basically just a typical electrical circuit and out of an electrical panel it's gonna go feed to potentially an outlet in a room a light switch and new light and we've got drawn here the hot wire in the neutral wire and those typical paths that these wires would take throughout your home in your home you're gonna have multiple circuits you're probably gonna have one for the kitchen one for your living room one for bedrooms or individual bedrooms they're all gonna have an electrical circuit in each electrical circuit is really defined by it has a Hotwire side of it and it has a neutral wire side of it and there's also going to be a ground wire in newer electrical circuits and the ground wire is very important to protect you we have not shown this here because ground wire is going everywhere and it is not part of what you need to know about how to add a neutral wire other than you need to have a ground in your electrical system and you should know that if you don't understand that you can contact qualified electrician or go through that process but a ground wire or metal conduit if you live in a state or locality that has metal conduit so what we've got here is kind of typically how things would be wiring up you've got a hot wire they would first go to an outlet and then on the other side of that outlet usually you're going to have a neutral wire they would come back to an electrical panel and the reason for that is that when you have an outlet you can't usually just daisy chain these along because if you did you wouldn't be providing power across the two plugs or the device that you were trying to power that's typically why the majority of outlets have both a hot and a neutral wire and typically even if you don't have a neutral wire in your light switch box and you wanna add a neutral wire there usually is a outlet on that same circuit somewhere that has a neutral wire but it wasn't always run to the light switch just because whoever was running the light switch wanted to do it fast or that's just how they did at that time and they just ran one water over there so if you want to add a neutral wire you could take it from here but we'll kind of walk you through how that works now there are plenty of light switches that do require a neutral wire for smart lighting and that's because they use the neutral wire to power the Wi-Fi chip without powering the lighting circuit so what happens is that Wi-Fi chip is power because you have a hot in a neutral going to it and it allows it to communicate with the router the reason that the Lutron caseta light switches don't have a neutral wire requirement is because they essentially dim the lighting switch to super super super tiny tiny amount of electricity and that electricity still goes through the circuit but it's not enough to activate the light so it is still able to power the Wi-Fi chip within the Aleut rohnke set a switch and that works because Lutron doesn't technically use Wi-Fi they use their own proprietary RF frequency which requires very little amount of power versus the majority of Wi-Fi light switches use actual Wi-Fi that communicates directly with your router and that communication process takes up a lot of power in a sense the reason that you need a neutral wire so you've got a hot in a neutral in your outlet and then typically from there if you don't have a neutral wire in your light switch already we're gonna have is a wire that will go from the outlet or you could have no outlet at all you could just have a hot wire going to this light switch and it's gonna go to the light switch and that hot wire goes in here and then you can see we've just indicated the light switch is open or it is off what happens then in the technical term for this wire coming out of the light switch to the light fixture or the device that you're empowered is called the load wire or write that up there for you and when the light switch is open there is no power going to the load as soon as this light switch closes now you have power flowing from a hot through this outlet or it doesn't have to be there if it's if it's not going through this hot wire going into the light switch the power then flows through the load and it goes to a light bulb here and it's going to light up the light bulb and now on the other side of that light bulb what you have is typically just one single wire plus the ground wire and that's gonna go now that electrical current is now gonna go back down what is the your wire down to the electrical panel now this neutral wire could be wired just like this instead down to the outlet or it could go back to the electrical panel doesn't matter as long as part of the same circuit we don't know how its wired because we can't see in walls but we can't open up electrical outlet take a cover plate off move the electrical outlet forward and see if a neutral wire is in there and I'm gonna guess 99% of the time you will have a neutral wire in there so you say how would I add a neutral wire to then to the light switch well what you could do is because you know you've got a neutral wire here on the backside of the light switch you could either find that okay and you could somehow bring it back down to the light switch right here you still have to let this wire go back to electrical panel or go back to the outlet how it is already wired up but you could go up to light fixture find that neutral wire which will be on the other side of wherever the load wire is and you could run that wire back down into the light switch and now you have a neutral wire for your smart light switch however it's probably gonna require you to open up walls and do some patching and everything to get that wire back down into the light switch so it's not always super easy but if you have conduit it's as simple as just pulling another wire down back through the conduit and into the light switch the other option that you have and you have to make sure that this neutral wire is on the same circuit that's the ideal way that you want to do this is that you could go from this outlet and you could splice in right here at this neutral wire that's on the outlet on the same circuit and you can run a neutral wire to the light switch like so so the difference really is do you want to open up your walls along the baseboard and you know you don't have to open up a big section and potentially drill through studs to wire it to your light switch or do you want to open up the ceiling where the ceiling fixture is and bring that electrical wire back down to the light switch it really just comes down to where do you want to do drywall patching because you can add the neutral wire but it's going to require you to open up walls unless you have conduit if you have conduit you could go to this outlet and you could push a wire from the outlet to the light switch or you could pull it depending on how that conduit is shaped and how many wires are already in there and everything else but it is possible with conduit and it is also possible without conduit it just means that you're gonna have to do some painting and patching so that is how you add a neutral wire for a smart light switch or for a light switch now I would recommend that if you're here and you're asking this question you probably should just install a smart light switch it does not require neutral because it will take less time it will cost you less money and you don't have have a huge understanding of how electrical systems work and you are more likely to get it right and have the product and end result how you want in which case I would recommend any Lutron cassette a system which works with Alexa Google home and Siri and is a really competent system now you can go do this on your own but you don't need to so I hope Alexa off I don't know why Alexa just did that I probably just yelled into the camera sorry for that but that is how you add a neutral to a light switch so I hope you enjoy please like and subscribe these some questions below in the comments if you have any and I will try and help you out thank you

Channel: One Hour Smart Home

Views: 119,894

Rating: 4.6100001 out of 5

Keywords: Adding A Neutral Wire To A Light Switch, How To Add A Neutral Wire, How To Add A Neutral Wire To A Light Switch, Smart Light Switch No Neutral Wire, Smart switch no neutral required, smart switch no neutral, smart light switch no neutral, how to add a neutral wire to an existing light switch, adding a neutral wire, how to add a neutral wire for smart switch, add neutral wire for smart switch, how to add a neutral wire to a switch box, do I need a neutral wire

Id: LaqPDBbMgLM

Length: 11min 12sec (672 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 18 2020