Episode 12 - How To Wire For A Switch Loop

what's going on everyone this is Dustin Selzer with another episode of electrician u and today we are going to talk switch loops so in today's episode what I want to do is set up a switch loop show you how its wired I have another video coming out that will explain on a whiteboard how the circuitry actually works so you have more of a visual representation of how all this stuff's gonna work but today we're going to talk about how to wire a switch loop so a switch loop is something that you would use say you have a door switch and you have a door that when you want that door to open whatever is on the other side of that door you want the light to come on automatically so normally you would notch out something and you would put this run a wire over here and then once the door is installed and you're ready to to trim everything out you would put this little plunger that's basically a switch but the problem is you can only ever run one wire from here somewhere and that's how you that's the two conductors that you have to use to be able to switch this light on so with a regular switch what you would do is you'd run an incoming hot to the switch from some kind of other hot somewhere from a panel or whatever you'd run a hot to the switch then you would run a switch leg from here up to the light and those are the only two wires that you would run you would wire not your neutrals and put your neutrals in the back of the box and you would hook the neutral up up here so you have a hot that comes all the way in goes through the switch up to here and you have a neutral that comes all the way and goes back to the panel you have a complete loop well you can still get a complete loop wiring a switch loop so what a switch loop is is instead of running a hot to your box first for your switch and then running a leg up to the light you actually run your hot to your light first and then you run one piece of 12 - that goes down here and your white wire is no longer a neutral it's just a conductor it's just another conductor a lot of people will tape it black so you'll have two wires down here but it's utilizing the fact that a switch doesn't need a neutral you don't need neutrals down here they always just get folded in the back of the box and they pass through the box so we're gonna instead use that white conductor as a switch leg or as a hot so let's begin I already ran one wire that goes from my switch box up to my light so we have to do now is run a hot so this is gonna be an incoming hot from God knows where so what I'm gonna do is run the hot I don't know say we're coming off of the plug somewhere that's where our hots coming from that hot wire is also going to go up into this light and this is the first stop that we take there's no reason that I have this wire run out it was just already there so I already ran it there so for now just don't pay attention to that way all right so those are the only two wires that we need still it's just the order of which we do them so we have a hot wire that comes in it bypasses this switch it's not in there at all it just comes in goes right up to the light and then we have our second wire that comes down into this switch and that's all the conductors that we need so what I'm going to do make this a little bit easier to understand is I'm going to put wire labels on everything so that you guys can actually see up close what's going on so I'm going to strip this out I'm gonna label I'm gonna label the incoming power with the word power and I don't do this out in the field and most of the guys actually know the guys that I do label this this way I'm just doing this for the video sake for you guys can see which wires are what so the new wires that I just ran in are gonna be my incoming power so I'm gonna put a tag that says power on the hot and the neutral and then I'm gonna take one more tag and I'm gonna label that one loop so that you all understand which wires are which because you just have two blacks to whites and grounds up there all right so first thing that I'm gonna do is just get our grounds out of the way you still do need to join our grounds together first thing I'm going to do is just get our grounds out of the way I still need to join the grounds together making sure that since this is a metal box we have our ground screw in there and one of these grounds is wrapped around that ground screw a very important part I'm just going to clip the excess off of there making sure that I have at least three inches of that you ain't sticking out her code and in this this particular situation I don't need a ground most light fixtures are going to need a ground but since I'm hooking up a keyless this key list only has gold and a silver screw on it so there is no place for a ground it's a ceramic fixture so there's no metal part on here that you could touch so it doesn't need a ground but I'm putting the ground together and ripping it out as if you were going to put that on the fixture so now you can see up in the light I've actually got my incoming power here and I've got my switch loop right here and then down in this box I've got a black and a white wire so again this white wire that comes up in here is from the loop side this is not a neutral this is just a white conductor this is our incoming power so this is our neutral that's the only neutral that's a part of this entire situation all right so what we want to do is deal with our incoming power first because I think it's just an easier way to identify what's going on so we've got a black and a white this is hot in neutral what we're gonna do is we're gonna take our white wire that's our 12 - that goes down to the switch below we're going to take our white wire and hook it up with the black incoming power and once we get that connected we're done with that there's nothing else to do now what we have left is a black and a white wire these are the black and white wires that we're going to hook up to our light fixture so what's going on is we ran our incoming power into this wire nut and then coming out on the white wire we're going to send that white wire all the way down to our box and this is going to be the hot side of our switch and then this black wire is going to be the leg so this will switch the leg go all the way back up here to this black conductor right here we don't do anything with this white wire the hot the the main neutral that's coming in this box the white conductor that says power this is our neutral that goes back to the panel so we have a hot for our light fixture to hook up to and a neutral for it to hook up to and this whole joint just gets moved out of the way completely so you have two wires left over all right so first thing that we're going to do is hook the ground wire up to our switch next we're gonna use this white wire like we said a minute ago white wire is not a neutral anymore it is now our hot so we're taking this white hot conductor and we're gonna hook it up to the switch it doesn't matter which side of the switch but I like to always around my hots on the bottom side just for consistency so I know when I'm troubleshooting something that I've wired that I can rely on that bottom screw to be my hot and last thing to do is deal with our switch leg this black wire is the switch leg that's going to send the power back up to the lights turn it on all right that's it now the final step is to put our light fixture up there there's not a lot of space in this in a job site you're not going to use a pancake to do this you're gonna use like a full-size box but I didn't have a full-sized box in my garage so this is what we're using just to illustrate the how-to this is not code because this has a certain cubic inch volume to it it's 6.0 cubic inches so you have to add up the value every one of these wires there's way too many wires in this box this is not to code again just illustration purposes so I am going to bend hook on my neutral then to hook on my Hut hook my neutral to the silver screw hook my switch leg up to the golden screw alright guys so that's pretty much it that's a swish loop we can turn our light switch on see that the light works again just a very quick review about how this works the idea is instead of running a hot to a switch you're running your hot you're entering your power up to the light first up in the ceiling a lot of really older houses are done this way it's just the wiring method that they used to do they'd run all their home runs up into the ceiling and hit different light boxes and then they would spread out throughout the house and run down the switches so switch loop again is just running a hot and the neutral up into a box leaving the neutral up there neutral just stays there because they're the only thing that needs it is the light neutral does not need to come down to a switch so you just run a black and white conductor down so you have a black or you have a white down for your hot and then you have a black as a switch leg back up and that's how it works it's pretty pretty easy to understand once you can see how all of it works so the next video you're gonna watch there's gonna actually be another schematic version where I'm gonna get over here on the whiteboard draw everything out and talk about you know how it actually works visually a little bit different way so you may need to watch this again if it's really difficult for you to understand if you don't understand definitely feel free to get at me leave some comments below or you know get at me on Facebook or Twitter or Instagram or wherever I love you guys thanks for watching [Music]

Channel: Electrician U

Views: 246,345

Keywords: electrician, electrical, electricity, apprentice, journeyman, master, electrical vlog, electrician vlog, electrical videos, electrician videos, electrical show, electrician show, electrician u, dustin stelzer, journey 2 master, switch loops, how switch loops work, how to wire a switch loop, switch loop, what is a switch loop, switch loops explained, diy, how to, how to wire

Id: invMXtTOMiQ

Length: 13min 55sec (835 seconds)

Published: Mon May 14 2018