How To Install Puck Lights | Interior Van Lighting Made Easy! (FULL TUTORIAL)

hey everybody it's st and steph from explorers.life we teach people how to build diy campers welcome back to episode number 15 in our diy ford transit camper van build series in last week's episode we installed some 12-volt outlets into the van and in this week's episode we're going to be installing some puck lights so let's get started [Music] here's a list of parts that you're going to need for this project puck lights a single pole single throw switch some spade connectors two conductor and three conductor lever nuts some wire a source of power and some assorted electrical tools like we've talked about in some previous videos this video is based on the diagrams found in the explorers life 12 volt branch circuit guidebook and we have also assembled a puck light wiring kit with all of the exact parts that we used in this video as well as a few alternative sizes which can be found at shop.explores.life i have my tabletop demonstration set up here to show you how this circuit is actually going to look once we get it into the van as well as kind of teach you how the lighting circuit actually works as well as how a switch works so on this tabletop here we've got one battery that's got positive and negative wires coming to a fuse block and this switch right here is off and so we don't have any power to anything down here i also go i also do have a fuse in position number one where the positive wire is connected and then the negative wire is connected to the negative bus bar right down here so this is all kind of pre-connected and if you're not really sure how to connect all this stuff you may check out two of the other videos that we put out right before this one as this video kind of builds on that one i want to show you how the lighting circuit actually works at its most basic level i have a puck light just a led puck light with a positive and negative wire coming off the back now these are black and white it's just what the manufacturer chose for these and the black is positive on this and we're using black as a negative coming off of this negative bus bar here which is typical in these systems so that's kind of confusing don't let that confuse you just pay attention to the label on the back of the light i'm going to take my lever nut here and a real quick refresher on lever nuts is these just pop up like so we can put our wires in there and then the wires are then effectively connected via this little bar in the back these are better than wire nuts because they won't loosen over time everything is locked in place and there was little chance of failure resistance heat fire all that stuff that we don't want i can put the negative wire into one side and the negative wire into the other side remembering it's white on the back of this light and then take another lever nut put the positive wire from the fuse block into one side and the positive wire from the light into the other side and then visually inspect the back of this to make sure that each of these wires is in the back of the lever nut nice and secure a great thing about these lever nuts is this is a perfect solution for wiring different sizes of wire together in the same connector now this is essentially hooked up and i can go ahead and turn this switch on and our light came on the battery switch off light goes off battery switch on light goes on so ultimately this is now a fully functioning light but you know i think for most purposes people are not going to want this light to be on 100 of the time and so now we need to wire in a switch and that's the next thing i'm going to do here here is the switch that we're using for this project and pretty much all of the other circuits in this in this build for the most part pretty simple switch here just a simple on off switch power comes in power goes out we have a switch here just goes back and forth now i want to talk to you about how a switch actually works this is the switch that we are using in this project so it goes on and off very similar to what i've drawn out here i want to show you how this switch works so this is the power coming in and power going out when the switch is in the on position there is the piece of metal that comes down to connect the incoming contactor to the outgoing contactor and whenever the switch is in the off position incoming contactor this piece of metal slides up out of the way and goes like this so that this is no longer connected to this and that's how this works so effectively the switch is just doing this to the light it's just disconnecting it and then reconnecting it disconnecting it reconnecting it on the positive side and now here's how we're going to wire the switch i've made two little jumpers uh with stripped ends on one side and spade connectors on the other side i went ahead and pre-made those for the sake of time if you don't know how to make these uh just check out the last two videos that we made we made these a few dozen times so check those out if you don't know how to make those those just go on the back side of the switch like so and then we can disconnect this wire from the fuse block put a lever nut on this side give it a tug make sure it's secure put it on this side of the switch which is connected to the middle terminal of the switch like so well it's not middle but on a lot of these switches there are other connectors up top so it's in the middle most the center most position of the switch there and then for the positive light the positive connector going to the light just put that on the other side of the switch clamp that down and then we have a light switch in this circuit the positive wire comes from the fuse block through the switch other side of the switch to the light and then the negative wire comes out this way lever nut here and back to the negative bus bar so the negative side in this system is not switched only the positive wire we're just breaking the positive wire connection here chances of us having a single light on a switch in our camper is i mean it's a possibility but usually there's more than one light so i'm going to show you how to do that now we are going to need to introduce some three conductor lever nuts into the system so one two and three so that we can combine more of the positive wires into the same lever nut and before we get working on the rest of the system we're going to go ahead and disconnect battery power by turning off this battery switch i'm going to go ahead and just disconnect this light here since the chances of you having the light directly next to the switch are also pretty small move it down the way and if you were actually wearing this you probably want to put your light switch a little further away from the switch so you're just going to connect an appropriately sized length of wire to these lever nuts here now these two wires here are ultimately only like eight inches long but this is kind of simulating this switch on the wall and then the light being on the ceiling so in real life this would probably be closer to you know i don't know five feet long or something like that now i'm going to grab two three conductor lever nuts here the positive on one side and negative in the next lever nut and then we can put the positive wire from the light remembering that the positive is black on this particular light into that lever nut and the negative one which is white on this particular light into the negative lever nut and so effectively this would be on the wall and this would be up on the ceiling and we would have one light on the ceiling now what if you wanted to put another light next to it well we just keep on doing the same thing that we've been doing we add another wire to this three conductor lever nut a black wire to the negative three conductor lever nut and then we can add more lever nets to the ends of these two wires we can put our next light in remembering that white is negative on these lights and the blacks are positive on these lights now we have a nice string of lights so we have positives to positives positives to positives negatives to negatives negatives positives to positives so it should be good to go here go ahead and turn my master switch back on turn the switch on here [Music] and both of these turned on so good to go here now if you wanted more lights in the same string you just keep on going really you've got positive and negative wires here you do positive and wired negative jumpers positive and negative jumpers and jumpers and jumpers on down the line attaching lights all the way down the line just like i've got pretty much on this little diagram here so you can add pretty much as many lights like this as you want now the other way i want to show you how to do lights is this way here and this is a really good way to get pairs of lights going down the center of the van which is actually what we will be doing in our sprinter over there and i'm going to show you how that looks right now so we've been working with the power off we're going to go ahead and turn this right back on see we have lights go ahead and turn these off for explaining we have positive and negative wires coming through our switch the exact same way as we did before i did not change anything here and then those are going through positive and negative wires to the first little let's call it a little junction if you will that would go off to our first pair of lights okay and then the positive and negative wires would go to our next junction if you will to our next pair of lights the key takeaway here is to understand that all of the positives and all of the negatives are simply tied together regardless of where they are in the system at no point in time is a positive and a negative wire connected here this is how this is actually going to look whenever we get it into the van as we're going to have pairs of lights going down the length of the van so we're going to go ahead and install all this stuff in the van in its proper spots and then circle back around with all of you so that you can see how this is actually going to look and how it's actually wired when it's a little harder to see inside the van [Music] so down here we've got a single 100 amp hour battleborn lithium battery that is just serving you know as power for our testing purposes the battery bank will be in the back but ultimately for this i'm just putting it here for now got positive and negative wires that are coming up to our temporarily temporarily installed fuse block that's right here this will live in this general vicinity actually mounted up properly but we just have a zip tied for temporary for now uh positive and negative wires coming off of the back of the fuse block to the switch right here switches will live in a switch panel that'll be right here above the door and that's where all the switches for our inside lights will be from our switch here we have our positive and negative wires going off to all of our puck lights and the lights are indeed actually working which is always good um positive and negative coming up to this first pair of lever nuts two wires are going off to these lights that are up front and then from these same lever nuts we have positive and negative wires coming back to this cross member right here and we've got these positive and negative wires running down this crossmember this part's a little confusing but if you can imagine these just being broken up side to side we have two lights right here and then two lights here and the back so this first junction this first junction if you will of the lever nuts is feeding the forward two lights and the back one is feeding the back two lights just important to remember all reds go to reds all all blacks go to blacks in terms of these right here and then be sure to account for positives and negatives on the actual puck lights if they're a different color which in our case they are now back at these pair of lever nuts here we're going back to the back to this cross member here positive and negative lever nuts there two of them are coming from this side two of them are going down this cross member to our puck lights here positives to positives and negatives negatives to negatives on both of those and then back through the cross member back to this junction to here and then curving around to this back cross member back here and this is the exact same as these forward ones right here and then these are going to live right back here so three other thoughts and considerations i wanted to talk about before we wrapped up this video uh the first one is wire management so we did leave a bit of slack on some of these wires that will get trimmed off eventually you know you want all this stuff to be nice and neat and the great thing about these lever nuts is to trim off the wire you're ultimately just disconnecting the lever nut pulling the wire out trimming the wire re-stripping it and then putting it back into the lever nuts you're not having to re-crimp or heat shrink anything like that so that's going to take care of a lot of the slack that we have going on here but we're not going to do that in this video the next thing is wire loom and a lot of these wires are going to be in wire loom but we wanted to see where like the biggest majority of the wire loom is actually going to be before we started putting all this stuff in there because once you start putting stuff into wire loom it kind of makes splicing and making these cuts and wire management a little bit more difficult so that might mean pulling some wires out and re-running some wires around some stuff and that's okay for the same reasons i just talked about with the lever nuts the last thing is the way we wired these lights that are going to be in parallel just all the way down and we put lever nuts on each light just to make it easier on ourselves because if we had done it the other way like this if we connected both of the lights to the same lever nuts here then this would have been up inside of the ceiling and would have been pretty hard to get to to actually make the physical connections once we actually put the ceiling up the way we wired these is just going to make our lives easier because we have to actually have these exposed through the holes that these lights are going to be installed in in the ceiling whenever we actually go to install the ceiling so when the ceiling actually goes up we'll have holes here that the puck lights are going to be installed in and these lever nuts are going to be sticking out of the holes we can make these connections to the lever nuts from the puck lights really nice and easy through those holes and then stuff that wire back up inside of the holes and then these lever nuts just kind of clip right in place inside of the ceiling now that the puck lights are all installed it's time for dimmer switches and that's coming up next so stay tuned now we hope you found this video helpful and if you did it would be awesome if you would share it with somebody or a group who you think could use it leave any questions you've got or new things you learned in the comments section below and if this video inspired you to build something be sure to share your projects with us on instagram by using the explore slide tag so that we can see and share your projects subscribe if you want to see more diy camper building tutorials and we will see in the next video

Channel: EXPLORIST life Mobile Marine & Off-Grid Electrical

Views: 99,988

Keywords: 12 volt puck lights led, 12v light, 12v light bar, 12v light switch wiring, 12v puck light with switch, how to install puck lights, how to wire 12v led lights, how to wire 12v led lights to a switch, how to wire 12v switch, interior van led lights, interior van lighting, puck light installation, van build, van interior lights, van light install, van light system, van lighting ideas, van lighting interior, van lights led, van lights wiring, wiring 12v puck lights

Id: o-YlpzrnuzI

Length: 19min 29sec (1169 seconds)

Published: Sun May 22 2022