How to Replace a Ceiling Fan - DIY Step by Step Guide

hey youtube it's robert back with another video and in today's video we're going to change out a ceiling fan and changing out a ceiling fan from an older fan to a newer one can be a great and inexpensive way for us to not only improve the air circulation in the room maybe improve the lighting but also just to change the look of the room update it make you know an older fan where you know in this case we've got kind of this ugly brass uh and change it to something that's maybe a little bit more modern and it can be a do-it-yourself project if we're basically changing from one fan to another now there are instances where we would be better off to get a licensed electrician involved that may be in a situation where we're going from just a light in the ceiling to an actual fan because our outlet box and wiring may not be set up to actually handle the fan components but if we're just going from one ceiling fan to another um a lot of times the wiring is relatively standardized and if we're basically we open this up and we see that it's pretty much ready to go and all we have to do is follow the pretty simple instructions in the new ceiling fan box then it really may not be something that you need to get a licensed electrician involved and you don't need that many tools to do it so we're going to go ahead and remove this thing see what we've got and then i'll take you through the process of just changing one out to another and i'm doing this during the day so i've got plenty of natural light coming in and for that reason before i even open this thing up i'm going to go ahead and go out to the breaker box flip the breaker switch off to cut power to this room then i'll come back in double check make sure i'm not getting any lights or fan turning on if you want to be extra careful at home you can use a voltage tester to make sure that you're not getting any power coming from those wires you can even do that into an outlet in the room uh but for our purposes i'm just gonna go out flip that off then we'll come back in here and we'll actually take the ceiling fan down all right and i have now turned the breaker off i've checked my switches not getting any power here not getting any power in my outlets um and so when i come up to my ceiling fan there's going to be at the base on this particular one i've got this little plate that just kind of fell off and it reveals where the actual screws are mounting the ceiling fan to the ceiling so i'm going to start with my phillips head screwdriver and i'm just going to unscrew all those so that i can pull it down from the ceiling now i started by removing the screws that are in the fixed holes the next thing i'm going to do is i'm going to loosen the two screws that are in the slotted holes and then that's going to allow me to turn the base just enough to drop the fan from the ceiling and here's where i'm talking about these slotted holes so once that screw gets loosened a little bit it'll allow me to turn that just enough that i can drop it all right so now i've loosened those i'm going to take from the base and i'm going to actually slide that out and drop the fan down see as soon as i've dropped that out basically i've removed it from the mount and the only thing holding this fan up at this point is me so this might be where you want to have somebody else that can hold it so in my case i'm actually i got the fan here i'm going to untwist my caps that are holding my wires in place and as i'm holding my fan i'm removing all of these components again if you don't have to hold the fan while you do this you're going to need another person or you're going to need some way to support it but i've now removed my old fan from the ceiling entirely and i've got my wires all set up there for me to place my new fan now these screws actually come from underneath and go up into our wire box so we're loosening those so that we can then pull this down now we're going to want to keep these screws because a lot of times your other ceiling fan is not going to have these uh they come with the wire box so as we release that you can see it's now coming down and we are going to keep both of these screws that i just pulled all right and the fan that we're going to be installing today is this harbor breeze grace bass series from lowe's it's a 52-inch fan so that's plenty of fan for the size of the room that we're putting it in but there are guides right on there as to you know what type of size you want based off the square footage of your room and then there's also some different options for us on the mounting options so that if we have higher ceilings we have extensions to bring the fan down more into the room but in my case i have eight foot ceilings so i'm just going to be using the flush or closed mount option on this install all right and as we've opened the box we're going to have our instructions we're going to set those aside we're going to get our blades out we won't need those right away and we're going to just start pulling the parts uh that we need out of here i am not going to need a extender on this one because we're going to be doing a flush mount install but again reading through the directions for your particular case you'll have to figure out which parts you need i am going to be needing our cover for the top and then we're going to have our lights which we'll be installing after we've mounted it so we have our arms that we'll be installing the ceiling fan blades onto we've got our holes for operating the light in the fan when you get to that point along with some other little parts and pieces and then we get to the bulk of it we've got our light covers and then we have our actual ceiling fan motor here so this is gonna be the part we're gonna be messing with first and so having removed the old mounting bracket uh the first thing we're gonna need to do is install the new mounting bracket that came with the ceiling fan now as i mentioned the screws that actually put the mounting bracket in are one of the only things that do not come with the mounting bracket because those screws actually came with the box that was installed for the ceiling fan before so we wanted to keep those when we removed the other for that reason well we're gonna go ahead and place our new mounting bracket on here and screw that in i always like to put the screws in a little bit loose at first until i have both of them in place so that if there's anything that was needing to be adjusted i have an easier time with it and i don't have to worry about holding the bracket quite as delicately when i start screwing these in all right so now we've got our new mounting bracket on it's nice and tight and solid we're gonna have our wires all set up ready to go so we can hang our fan motor on here and start getting things connected all right so looking at our fan base here we've got quite a bit of extra wire and i am going to cut some of that off but i'm going to make sure that i leave enough so that if i ever did decide to drop it down from the ceiling a little bit i have enough wire to do so even though i'm pretty sure this is going to stay a flush mount all right and so i'm going to take my wire cutter and i'm going to remove a lot of this excess wire i don't want to remove too much i want to make sure i still have some wiggle room when i go to connect everything but i'm going to go ahead and just clip that all the way through and then i want to remove the ends so that i have some of the actual wire exposed so i'm going to cut through the casing here by just pinching a little bit on the outside enough that i can break through that without cutting all the way through the wire and i end up with exposed ends all right and now you can see i've got my wires shortened and i've removed a little bit from the ends so i've got some of the actual wire exposed so now we're ready to go ahead and pull her on up get this part of it mounted and get our wires connected okay and now i've got my fan with the canopy connected to it and our wires are running through so i'm ready to basically do my final installation here of this portion where i'm going to go ahead and hang my fan on the nice little hook that i have here for it so that i have both my hands free to connect our wires and that's going to be the fun part we're basically going to be connecting uh like colors so our black wire is going to be the hot wire for the fan so we're going to connect black to black that being the black from the fan and the black coming out of our ceiling and then uh blue and the red is going to be the hot wires for the light so those two will connect then we have our white wire which is our neutral and our green wire is our ground so we need to make sure that the green wire is connected to the copper that's coming out of the ceiling sometimes that might be covered in green as well in this case i just have a copper wire coming there we're going to go ahead we're going to get those all connected we're going to have our wire caps screwed onto them and then we're going to cover that with our electric tape then like i said for the fun part we're going to connect our wires so we've got our wire caps we'll put our green and our copper ground together get those tight and we have our neutral wire is our white so we go again white to white put our wire cap on there as well and get that nice and tight our black again is our hot wire for the fan and this is because i have a switch that operates the fan and the light independently the instructions for this particular fan do give you options depending on whether you have one switch two if you're just operating them with strictly the pull cables attached to the fan uh and so then we have our red and our blue wire is going to be the hot wire for the actual light so i got my caps on all of those and the next thing we're going to do is cover all of these with electrical tape around the ends completely encapsulating the wires where they meet so there you can see we've got the electrical tape over the wires and now we take and connect the canopy up to our mounting bracket so i feel our fan is now mounted now we have the part that our lights connect to um so we see a bunch of wires here but we don't have to worry about doing anything with those other than connecting these open ends with the two here and again we're just gonna go white to white and then blue to black to connect those and once we have those connected everything's just going to fit up into this housing up here and we'll be screwing this back into that casing all right so at this point we've done all the hardest work here we've got our new fan mounted up to the ceiling and the only things we have left is to go ahead and get our bulbs and light covers on and then get our ceiling fan blades uh installed at the top here then we're gonna go ahead and turn the breaker back on and test it all out okay now we're ready for the moment of truth i've connected my poles my lights and my fan blades and so i'm going to go back outside i'm going to turn the breaker on we're going to test it all out make sure we're not setting the house on fire and that everything's working properly okay we're going to test it out with our wall switches we've got two so our first one is going to operate our light we check that and it works come over check my cable and it operates from my pole also then we're going to check on our fan hit our wall switch and it's moving now right up at the light switch here we have a little um switch that actually operates which direction the fan blades go so if it goes in one direction it's blowing the air up and out the other direction is blowing it down so i've checked to make sure that it's blowing down now i'm going to check from my poles here that i actually have my speed settings working so there should be three and then my fourth pull will turn the fan off and so i've already changed it to the second speed change it to the third and then again we could shut it off entirely from our pole even with the wall outlet still on so there you have it this is a project that could take as little as a couple hours and if we're just changing from one ceiling fan to another just kind of update it maybe go to something that's a little bit bigger um you know a little bit more of a contemporary color and design you know i went from more of a brass to a brush nickel look uh so just if we're looking to do something kind of simple and straightforward like that then a lot of the elements of the electrical are pretty straightforward and they don't really require a lot of professional knowledge in terms of electrical work we want to make sure that our breaker is off so that there's definitely no power going to the light while we're working with it otherwise the wires should largely be color coordinated from one fan to the next uh so most of the components that you need are contained within the box for the new ceiling fan that you bought and it's definitely worth at least attempting to see if it's something that you could tackle if you like do-it-yourself projects uh because this is a pretty inexpensive and easy way for you to really upgrade the look of the room and the function of your light and your ceiling fan you know get a little bit better lighting get a little bit more uh circulation in the room and we could do that for you know under a hundred dollars and under a couple hours of our own time if you found this video helpful be sure to hit the thumbs up button for me and comment down below with any thoughts or questions that you might have anything that i could maybe clarify a little bit for you and be sure to subscribe if you'd like to see more videos from me in the future again my name is robert and i'm here to help with all your remodeling needs so until next time happy remodeling and have a great day

Channel: Remodel With Robert

Views: 818,945

Keywords: Change a ceiling fan, DIY, Easy Ceiling fan replacement, replace a ceiling fan, harbor breeze, Grace Bay, Lowes ceiling fan, How to change a ceiling fan, hampton bay

Id: 5-YPPvbkJHM

Length: 14min 54sec (894 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 04 2021