How To Add A New Light To An Existing Circuit | Basement, Attic, Or Crawlspace

very common in a basement such as this which is an early 1900s built home to have barely any lighting now this is a very approachable project to many diyers if they're comfortable doing their own electrical work so today i'm going to show you how to do just that by running a new piece of wire from this electrical box that has a lamp holder in it and run it back to the end of the basement here and just simply add another ceiling electrical box and a new lamp holder to brighten up the space so with just about an hour of your time you can make a whole lot of difference in the lighting of your basement or crawl space or even up in your attic so let's jump into it so a little more details on our project we have the switch over here right by our door it's going to run over to our ceiling electrical box that has a lamp holder installed that is we're going to branch off our romex we're going to run it through these joists here by drilling holes through and then bring it all the way back to this already installed electrical box and that's where we'll be adding the lamp so overall a pretty straightforward project and then we'll talk a little bit more why you shouldn't be running your romex like you see here when it's just stapled on the bottom of the floor joists so first up i'm going to actually start laying out my romex getting it to the path that i want and drilling through these floor joists and then we'll go ahead and splice everything in now depending on how clean of an install you're going for you can either just eyeball drilling through these joists i have like six or seven that i'm gonna need to drill through or you can just simply use a piece of string like i have here and then that's going to give you your reference marks you can use so you consistently in a straight line drill through your floor joists so now for the floor joists i know where i want to drill from left to right in the room and now i'm going to mark consistently how high on the floor joists i want to be drilling holes now remember you should not be drilling too high or too low usually you're looking for like a two inch no-fly zone so you don't want romex going too low or too high because that's if somebody's securing something to the floor joists and they sink a nail and your romex is close to the edge then the nail can pierce your road max and lead to bigger issues so i'm going to do is mark three inches up all right so now i'm ready to start drilling through the floor joists all i'm going to use is a 5 8 spade bit now depending on how many you're going through you might want to use more like a three quarter which could make getting that romex through let's say 10 15 20 joists a little bit easier but since i'm only going through seven joists the 5 8 should be fine before you start drilling always check the back side to make sure you're not going to be drilling into anything and remember to use eye protection especially when working overhead [Music] so i mentioned this at the start you see this 12.2 row max which is secured with staples to the bottom of the floor joist now that in most places would not pass code and most of the code is associated to safety durability reliability and trying to avoid failures so with this being non-metallic or romax the protection is minimal so with it exposed to the bottom of floor joists like this really if you're even moving things into your basement let's say it's a metal storage shelf and it even nicks this romex you can see how that would easily possibly cause a short and could be a dangerous situation that's why it is preferred to drill holes like we did on the one side where our floor joists were going side to side or run up in the cavity between the floor joists as a best practice now with the staples i usually do more than enough so just as long as you have one every about four foot you're doing good and then there should be a staple within 12 inches of your electrical box the new one that we installed so now we'll wire up that new lamp holder all right so we have our romex it's cut to about four inches of wire past the electrical box here we stripped off the extra insulation so we have our neutral our bare ground and our hot all we're going to be doing is installing this eaton lamp holder this is a basic porcelain lamp holder you can get plastic lamp holders you can get lamp holders with on up switches built in you can get lamp holders with an outlet built in then as always gold is going to be your hot and then the silver is going to be your neutral just remember when securing the wire your hook your shepherd's hook to the screws you always want to go in the clockwise direction so when you're tightening the screw down the wire would have a tendency to pull around the screw now if you have a pair of needle nose pliers it's not bad to actually close up that shepherd's hook a little bit so even if that screw starts to back out it it'll want to hold on to that terminal then we'll do that same thing for the neutral and then tighten the terminal down now the ground is going to be unused on this lamp holder if you had that built-in outlet you would be using the ground to make sure you have a ground for the three prong outlet but in this case we're gonna tuck it up and just make sure it's clear and out of the way of your other terminals the lamp holder does come with two 832 mounting screws those will go in the outside holes of this electrical box but they are a bit long so what i'm going to do i'm just going to use my pair of linesman's pliers and trim these down quite a bit then i'll go ahead and get those started now just one note when you trim those 832s down if you have a plastic box they're much easier to get them to thread in if you had a metal box because you kind of bugger up the ends of those threads you might have to do a little work before you'll get them to start actually threading into the electrical box all right so now we'll just match up our screws up a little bit and then i'll tighten them down but remember this is a porcelain lamp holder so do not tighten them down too much or you might crack your housing and you'll be going back down to the home improvement store to get another one so one more step and then we'll test it out so now we'll tie everything together just undo this lamp holder bring my 14 2 in so all right so the way we'll tie this all together is i took the lap lamp holder and i already wired in two wago two two one lever nuts now this is one of the reasons i really like the wagos for these type of projects because i already put my pigtails on the lamp holder then i can just bring in the 12 gauge coming from the switch and then the 14 gauge going to our new lamp holder now my neutrals are all connected up and i can do that same thing for the hot side making sure i'm bottoming out the copper before flipping the switch or flipping the lever and then doing a pull test making sure everything's good now even though i'm not grounding that lamp holder at the end i am going to bring together these ground just with the two pin lever nut keep things clean tuck everything back up putting the neutral on one side hot on the other [Applause] mounting our lamp holder again not over tightening because it is porcelain we don't want to damage it so now let's test out that bulb back there i'll flip the switch all right looks like we are good to go if you need more light and you don't want to do any more wiring you can get one of these guys they're multi-head led arrays that you can adjust and they're extremely bright and can really lighten up a space so you look down the description i'll show you the parts that we use the wago 221 lever nuts but also i'll put a link so you can see those if you haven't already now if you have more lighting projects in your future check out this video right here where i show you how to install the small thin led recessed wafer lights which can be an awesome addition to your living space thanks for stopping by and we'll catch you on that next video

Channel: Everyday Home Repairs

Views: 620,727

Keywords: adding a light to an existing circuit, how to add a light in the attic, electrical diy

Id: SxplANwjS9E

Length: 11min 7sec (667 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 22 2021