How To Install LED Pot Lights In a Finished Ceiling | DIY

hey it's jeff from home renovation and today we are talking about pot lights and specifically how you can install them in a finished ceiling a lot of people have got a room uh old wiring techniques there's one central room light today we're going to show you how to take that room light replace it with a pot light and then add more lights in the same room on the same switch we're going to talk about what size to use the technical data around it the systems the techniques the tools the materials everything you see here it's pretty basic and on jeff's scale of difficulty i'm gonna call this one a three all you really need to know how to do on this one is know how to cut and measure and just a couple of techniques for my electrical toolbox you know how to use my reds how to put the cable connectors together it's really basic i think any homeowner should be able to tackle a project like this and it gives you the ability to go from one old ugly light to a bunch of pot lights that can be put on a dimmer that hardly costs you any money on hydro remember if you can get rid of your central room light and go to a light like this this light only costs you one dollar a year to have it on what a deal worth the investment i think everybody should do it so let's go over to our part of the studio where we're going to be installing this we'll show you all about what's going on and how to space it how many lights you're going to need all the information you need to be successful your project is in this video let's get at it until recently most homes have not been built with more than just one central room light or they only had plugs attached to a switch if you're talking before 1970 so people could walk in the room and turn on the lamps if you have a house that's in that category today we're going to show you how to run pot lights from an existing source and a finished ceiling so you can change over your one central room light into something that's a lot more modern and give you exactly the kind of light that you're looking for where you want it we're also going to answer all the questions about do i do four inch or six inch what's the spacing what about the angle of the beam all of these things color temperature there's a lot of information what i'm going to do is a live demonstration we're going to go up here remove a fixture we're going to fish the wire through the ceiling show you how to use a fish tape huh right all of the tips and tricks that you're going to need you can do this and you can do it yourself and you can do a professional job so let me show you how so we're going to just jump into it i'm going to disassemble this light fixture here uh most people aren't going to have a light in their house i get it this is my church i'm renovating in the basement this is our studio it's a 10 foot ceiling so this is what i have chances are once you remove your light you're gonna have something like this in your ceiling flush with the drywall okay now if the box is screwed to some sort of framing from inside and you can undo the screw and just pull the box out great you have all the flexibility in the world you still could go with four inch or a six inch light and you still have options if it is not able to do that because it has a bracket or screwed from the side and you have to make a bigger mess in order to find the screws and get it out then you're committing to a six inch light because this is only a four inch box if you cut a six inch hole you can take any box that's in the ceiling and remove it and still have a perfectly finished round hole that you can install your next fixture in so that's why in a lot of remodeling situations with a closed ceiling it's just best to plan on using the six inch and there's other things to consider as well we'll get into that as we build the video for now we're done with that now fluorescent lights you just rotate okay you go out of the pins cross corner and they slide out these two pins go in and then they roll and they lock in case you're wondering okay you want to be real careful with these because if you break it they shatter in a million pieces and they have toxic stuff inside them that you don't want to let into your atmosphere where you're breathing for now we're done with these i'm just joking [Laughter] now all of the wiring for this unit is all in behind and so this is actually just a piece of metal and it's compressed under these little clips and you just squeeze it together and then it just pops right out and it should expose the ballast as a side note while we're here great teaching opportunity these little clips here you see this these are actually just compressed into the middle and you can actually swap these out so if you have a light fixture like this it's not working anymore you can actually go to the hardware store and buy these little units here and you can replace them and stick them back in and get another whatever year is for your light fixture the ballast itself if you notice that it's dripping like this this is toxic don't touch it it's really bad osmosis toxicity going on there all right um they overheat and they start to drip all right poison don't eat okay generally with these lights the um because the whole light fixture is a steel box you don't have to have the octagon in the ceiling so what they do is they have a couple of mounting screws and then just a hole in the ceiling where the wire comes down so what we want to do first is disengage the black and the white in the ground coming from the ceiling okay there we go that's that i don't have any cutters on me so i'll just pull them rats okay this is all wiring for the light and that's what we want to leave of course we're working with the power off here now i've got to find out where it's attached to the ceiling i got a screw here and i got a screw here yeah here's the funny part that's not in the wood that's not in the wood this one's probably in the wood yeah that one's in the wood that's actually holding the light fixture up um like i said before i know the video is about doing it in a finished ceiling when i take this down i'm actually going to have two extra holes unfortunately but the principle holds true all right it's just in the drywall but yeah we got to get a thread in the middle there we go and it's been up for so long it's probably just glued in place and oh we got one more screw over here there we go okay oh wow it used to be a really shiny ceiling [Laughter] wow and there's a box what a great teachable moment okay this is fun now this particular box does seem to be mounted straight up well that is good let's see if we get lucky here i need my knife now this looks exactly like what you're going to find at your house after you take your light fixture out we're just going to cut back a little bit of drywall here make sure that it's easy to get this out that looks like most poop i don't know what the heck yum yeah somebody just poured mud in there to fill the hole okay here we go yeah now we're going to rescue this from the box so that we can actually use this wire to put in our light there we go okay oh that's nice there's like no extra wire okay so now we have a location this is one of these points where you start to realize how something is built okay here's a great opportunity now there are really two options in the ceiling i know this is a finished ceiling but i'm going to draw on it just to give you a little heads up i can see strapping here right there i see a two by four that's just raised up going left to right i know that my joist package is going this way i don't know where it is but i know it's going left and right it's uh five inches to the left so my joist is here and then my other joist is 16 inches away the red square right here i can confirm that wow it's 14. no way there we go come on 14. that means in this particular building my joists are 24 inches on center that is not what i wanted to hear but that's still allowed as long as it's a two by ten and it is okay good what that means is i've got joyce running this way but strapping underneath of it going this way which means if this is my joist this is my drywall i have a space between the two that i can fish my tape around in this environment you are guaranteed you can put your pot lights wherever you want to okay there's no obstruction because all you have to do is you can run from here drill a hole over here put another light and then we're gonna fish four ten feet away whatever it is so we have the ability because it's strapped to put this wherever we want without damaging the ceiling if there's no strapping and the drywall is directly to the floor joist you are going to have to make extra holes and then patch them it's not exciting there are some houses out there the drywall is right to the floor joist package there's no strapping so the first thing you want to do is remove your light get in here feel around right put your arm up in this space identify if you got strapping understand the construction technology you're dealing with before you make a decision about how many holes you want to build if you're going to be making a mess and drilling extra holes the rest of this you don't have to be that careful you can make as many mistakes as you like now because you're going to be sanding and priming and painting if you're like i am and you have one central light and the ceiling is in perfect condition and you have strapping now we're in a position let's just move forward from there because that's gonna be the majority of the situation now we're in a position where we can figure out how many lights we want in the room now we get into the math this room sealing the ceiling is almost 11 feet generally speaking when you figure out how many lights you want you want to take a look at three considerations let me just grab the package now you can get a four or six inch light with the same amount of watts okay the size of the light doesn't mean how many watts because they're led so what you want to do is you want to get at least the 15 watt led which is like 100 watt light bulb now when you look down here the information there's a piece of information along the side here bam okay here it is it shows you how long it's gonna life last sorry but on the back over here it shows you the angle see this beam angle crucially important because this beam angle here tells you how the light works this box is 120. the other light that i have is a 38 alright so just for fun i'm going to demonstrate what those two angles mean and why it's so important to know this because it'll tell you how many lights you're going to need in your room okay so i need a screw i got a chalk line this will help make this visual visibility really easy okay now this here it's about 120 angle beam okay that's about a 90 that's about 120 makes sense so if you have this beam and you're in a 10 foot ceiling and let's say i'm at average height just under six feet my light is passing here if i'm walking in this part of the room and i don't have another light fixture with the beam coming along and intersecting it above my eyes i'm effectively going to be walking in and out of the light into the dark all through the room and you've maybe been in a place like that it's like spooky basements have this happen a lot people don't use enough lights in a basement it's usually a lower ceiling it's lower than eight feet now at ten feet you can probably as long as my intersection is from here i'm probably good right so i could have lights as far as six feet apart on a ten foot ceiling if it's an eight foot ceiling you wanna put your lights no more than four feet apart okay now having said that four feet is a lot of distance and you might not want to have just four feet apart you might want to bring even more lights than that okay it might be easier for you to fish that along if instead of every four feet you went with every three if i went if i didn't have strapping on with the two foot joists i could go a light every two feet right all the way down the run and put it on a dimmer switch so i can reduce how many how much power i'm putting into the room that's one way to work around a situation but for normal situations i like 36 inches of spacing i like 24 inches off a wall because remember you're talking about the angle of that beam you don't want next to a wall and the light only hits way down low so i like 24 inches off a wall every three feet after that i like to fill the room if you've got a tall ceiling go every four feet okay it's not that tricky it is easier to have more lights and reduce the dimmer effect than to not have enough light in the room it really screams when you have those dead zones and you look around you go from bright to dark in the room it really says somebody didn't think this out very well so hopefully that helps now let's get into the actual wiring situation okay so my light is five and a half feet from the wall so what i'm gonna do is put a little pencil mark two feet okay and i wanna make sure i'm kind of square about there okay now that's where i want to put my light this is an easy one to do because i'm inside of a joist cavity the only thing i've got to find out is am i marking where that strapping is because i don't want to have to cut through this dropping so let's find out and we do that we just put our stud finder here if it goes red there's wood there's wood here yeah there is okay good so if the stud is over here the strapping is over here we're gonna be safe there this particular box it gives you information for cutting okay all the information you need about your light is on the box read all four sides this isn't serial there's like actually tons of information here this light says here that the hole should be six and one-eighth of an inch and the light itself is six and three-quarters now that's not a lot of mercy now if you have a six and one-eighth inch hole saw you'll never find it then you're great but what they do is they give you this it's the packaging the light came in the box and it was sitting in this hole so we're going to double check and this packaging the hole is five and three quarters and i want six in something okay now you can use this as a template put it up on the ceiling right and you can do your circle with it okay and connect the dots here now you want six and an eighth and so you can kind of split the difference here okay you see that i'm basically adding 3 16 all the way around the circle that's all and you can basically freehand that circle now 3 16 or knowing you're going 3 16 just pull out your saw and cut the darn thing so i'm going to cut on the inside of the line and i hit something lovely that's going to happen folks we'll deal with that when we get there and a warning when you're using a drywall saw to cut a hole like this cut on the upward thrust not on the downward thrust because you risk tearing the paper okay so if you're only pushing forward when you're on the upward thrust you'll never tear the paper off if i'm pulling down while i'm cutting i can run a bit of paper off and then i'm no longer have a finished ceiling [Music] let's find out how much of this what is in the way okay we're gonna finish the rest of this with a utility knife great teachable moment all right okay here we go one of the benefits of these lights is the main body of this light is not as thick as the drywall okay so even though i've exposed wooden that's in the way i don't have to cut through that structure or compromise it as long as i've got two locations where i can put these pins when i'm ready okay and get the wire tucked up out of the way we're gonna see if this is gonna fit now okay that actually works really nice when you see the spring take your knife and push it up there and open up the open up the spring by pushing in take the pressure off the drywall so you don't tear it okay there we go so we know we're good now we got to do is run a wire so the wire we're going to be using for all residential wiring all lighting applications it's called 14 2 this is the gauge this says the two there's a black and a white it's all you need for light fixtures the only time you need to go with the three wire is if you have a three-way switch and the wiring of the fixtures goes three wire from the switch to the light and then to another switch if that happens if you open this up and you see a black white and a red and it's on a three-way switch that's what they're doing okay so then you'd have to continue that going three and connecting all of those wires in every box black and white to the fixture and red merited to itself but for most situations what you're gonna find is two just the black and white is going to do the job most guys that wire a three-way switch wire switch switch then lights because then they don't have to use three wire to all the lights all right today's shout out goes off to cassie and cameron one of our members they actually built the craft room i know right like not all of us have to renovate an entire 1880s house i'm proud of you great job right learning skills and being successful in the project is what this channel is all about we're here to help we're happy to do it check us out on instagram and facebook guys give us your submission let us know where you live let us know what you do for a living and let us share with the world your success story so we can encourage each other in the community all right let's get back to the video i also want to cut this hole to be the same six inch hole right same routine i'm not even going to get close to the old hole i don't care about it and i'm going to cut a little bit wider than what you see if you're one of these people that likes to be really precise with stuff go ahead be as precise as you want right cut a template that's exactly six and an eighth don't worry about it there's nothing wrong with that i just uh i know i've got a little bit of wiggle room and if i need to trim it up a little bit later because i cut too small i'm okay with that okay or that temporary screw i put in there there we go now get this out of the way just for a second i'm gonna do the same thing i'm gonna test this hole and make sure that i've got it cut right i'm looking for integrity in the drywall we'll go there and we'll go here and we'll get that wire in there look gonna work just fine okay now let's do this again push that over okay and we're good to go now we gotta do is fish it now if you're inside of a joist cavity and you want to just push a wire across you probably can get away with that not all that tricky all right let's see and boom okay now this wire only comes so low no sense making this wire any longer than that one so like i said depending on your room your size your shape you can put as many lights as you like i'm going to do one more so what i'm going to do is i'm going to take my pencil and hold it where my end of my tape is and i'm going to come over to where i find four feet okay put that in the center of the hole make a little mark my center line here is going to be two feet there we go let's just put our box based on this we'll trace our cardboard and we'll cut the hole a little bigger than the circle we're probably going to end up with a strapping in the same spot again but that's fine there's two reasons i'm recommending when you're doing this in a finished ceiling to go to the six inch light one of them is that like i've just demonstrated it's a lot easier to get your arms in to work around to fish around in a six inch length in a four the second reason is what if the hole that we were drilling was right over a floor joist okay in a lot of cases the um the packs that come in the lights and with a four inch hole can't get between the drywall and the floor joist okay and that's a challenge that's a real problem so by going with a six inch light even if there's a floor joist right in the middle there's enough room to slide this up beside it drop it in the ceiling and then connect your wiring okay so that's why i'm suggesting you go with the six inch light if you don't know what's going on because it gives you options for all the installation later now as far as working with the fish tape i'm gonna suggest you always start at the end and go back to where you were the way this works is the rod the tape kind of pulls out of the handle and you'll see the whole carriage is moving around okay and when it's time to close it all up you hold this and you grab the grab the wheel and you turn it together and that's how you bring it back in and because it's round it's always in a loop so when you put it in the ceiling because it's a flat tape it'll just travel across the drywall until it comes to the hole and if it meets with any obstruction you can flip it over so here we go i'm going to go underneath the floor joist and just push it in the general direction where i want it to go should just pop out the other side there we go all right now we want to have enough wire for this light right and over to here and then put the dangle down i'm not going to let go of my tape all right so then all we got to do is tape this wire to the fish tape now now if i just pull this out enough i can set it there and it won't fall out of the ceiling there we go okay here we go secret here cut the last couple inches of the sheathing off cut your black and white wires okay make this a hook because that's a hook you simply hook them together we're not going very far and i don't think there's any obstruction so i'm not going to bother taping it but in the event that you're going through weird spaces and you had to fight to get the tape somewhere you would just take electrical tape and tape this all together okay i'm just going to pull it through like this [Applause] now i'm going to help it over the corner [Applause] okay when you're pulling try to be on one end lifting it off the drywall okay so you're pulling it across and on the other end you want to be pulling straight across the hole if you're putting too much downward pressure you can break the drywall remember this is the finished ceiling so the last thing we want to do is break the drywall here right there we go so now i've got enough wire here to make my connection and enough wire here i just disengaged all right so now we're just going to go through the steps to wire you want to have about three inches of wire exposed okay here we are so you need your alpha knife you're going to need a wire stripper now wire stripper comes with the gauge and these numbers correspond with the wire itself we're using 14 2 so you find the 14 hole and then you set that in the 14 hole and about three quarters of an inch with the wire a pinch and a little twist there we go and 14. okay all right now for prepping the box pop the door open i can put a grommet on the end or either side i always like to go the end opposite of the wire because it's just a good habit to get into in case you're fishing your wire through in an odd spot it makes life simple you're right yeah now they don't come with the grommets you're gonna have to go and buy a package okay they come in packages of fiber you can buy buckets of these things right and here they are they're just a little half inch plastic okay take your square nose cut off side cutters give it a little love tip and then you pinch it and just wiggle it and it'll snap off okay then you stick it in the tape short tapered side and you squeeze it to close it and then you set it in and that's it it's not going anywhere here's a cross section of the grommet you want to push your wire through so that that tab is bent down out of the way and then it's in there pretty fixed so it holds the wires you want to get that right to the sheathing okay and there's my other one right until the sheathing up here is inside that little grabbing section okay here we go pay attention inside of the box as well all right get these out of the way here and we'll just curl these so there's lots of room all right here we go now now i want to push that sheathing until i see it sticking out inside the box okay now you know you've got a good grab that's not coming off by accident all right now it's as simple if there's one or two wires it doesn't make a difference you just take the corresponding green wire goes with the copper all right shove that on there and then the white one goes with the white one and then the black one goes with the black one wiring couldn't be any simpler there we go and that is why i'm a big proponent of a residential homeowner's electrical certificate you could take a course and anybody should be allowed to wire their own house as long as you know the black and white go together ninety percent of the time i don't think we'll ever see it but hey it would be nice see okay the only thing that's left is to attach see this groove here there is a corresponding bump and you have to put those together in the right location and they slide together and then you twist this on now you know you've got positive contact we can slide this up into the ceiling [Music] okay now take the first tab and put it up against the drywall and then take the second tab push it around and then it'll all just snap right in there here we go i'm gonna go and turn on the light we'll see how that worked okay max let's turn on the power there you go wow that is beautiful light right now this flight is set at uh wow that's a 5 000. all right that's 4 000 and that's 3 000 kelvin okay so you get to decide if you have other lighting in there in the area and you've got to match it up that's like traditional incandescent lighting that's more daytime lighting and that is the blue lighting right so you get to pick this works amazing the new technology on led lights gives you all that flexibility in case the design trends change down the road these lights last for years and i would just okay all right guys well this that's how easy it is couple of hand tools and you can add lights to your own ceiling it's a really great way and you can take this technology and you can adjust it to whatever you're doing on the difficulty scale this is like a three you got to be able to cut and measure and you got to connect black and white it's not that tricky anybody can do this at home now if you aren't aware of all the different led packages that are available in the market all the different lighting schemes that you can get they have replacements for traditional fluorescent tubes and for drop ceilings and anything else you can imagine check this video out right here we'd go through a whole list of all the different advancements that were in lighting technology nowadays hopefully that'll be helpful for you cheers we'll see you next time

Channel: Home RenoVision DIY

Views: 1,175,099

Keywords: homerenovision, renovision, LED pot loights, pot lights, slim line pot lights, how to install pot lights, pot light installation, home improvement, how to install can lights, led lights, recessed lighting installation, how to install recessed lighting, kitchen lighting, best recessed lights, installing recessed lights, how to install recessed lights, recessed lighting, jeff thorman, how to measure pot lights, how to install pot lights in a finished ceiling

Id: pc5HWB-tyng

Length: 31min 57sec (1917 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 19 2022