How To Wire 3 Switches With One Power Source | Install Multiple Light Switches In One Box

what's up guys adam here with another home improvement video and in this video i'm gonna be showing you how to wire up multiple light switches with only having one power source coming into the box or one line wire coming in supplying the power from your panel and while this is actually a very common installation it's also a question that's very commonly asked and actually one that i've been asked in the past as to how do you take that one wire that's supplying the electricity and then branch it out amongst light switches and then also fixtures so it's actually probably easier than you think but until you see it it may seem a little bit confusing so let's go ahead and jump right in [Music] [Applause] [Music] all right so the first thing we need to do is make sure that we turn off the circuit breaker that is sending the power to where we're going to be installing the switches and then after we've turned the circuit breaker off then we need to use our multimeter and confirm that the power is in fact off all right so now that we've confirmed that the power is off this is the power that's coming in these wires down here at the bottom and then these three sets of wires up here in the top they are going to then be going to the fixtures that the three light switches are going to be powering so first thing we need to do is we need to collect all of our ground wires together and you're going to need the same amount of pigtails for the amount of switches that you're going to be installing so in this case i've got three light switches that i'm going to be installing so i'm going to need three pigtails so you can just take some excess wire ground wire and cut them up so then you can use them as pigtails and you're also going to repeat this process when we start hooking up the hot wires all right so now i've got my three pigtails and now i need to connect all these ground wires together using a wire nut so you just bunch them all up together like this and you start to twist them so now we've got them all started together we can now take our wire nut and put that on top and just spin it on all right so now that our ground wires are all wire nutted together we can put this towards the back of the box all right so now that we've got our ground wires pigtailed and all of them put together the next thing that we can do is we can start putting all of our neutral wires together all these white neutral wires will do the exact same thing that we did with the ground wires and put them all together with a wire nut now the only difference is there won't be any pigtails necessary for this as no neutral wires get actually attached to the light switch so once you've got all your neutral wires together you can tuck those back in the back of the box along with the ground wires all right so now we can start working on our hot wire that's coming in from the panel it's coming up from the bottom of the box that's this one here and we're going to need three pigtails since we've got three light switches and we're going to leave these load lines alone that are going to our fixtures and so we're just going to take our pigtails like we've done with the other wires in the past with the grounds and the neutral wires and we're just going to pair them up with this hot wire that's coming into this box get them started twisting and then take a wire nut and put that wire nut on top and bring all those pigtails together with that line wire or that power source that's coming in so now we can also take this and put it in the back of the box right so now all the wiring is pretty much done so now we can start with actually installing these light switches so all of these black wires on the bottom here are all of our power supply coming in they're all wire nutted to the line wire coming in so we took one line wire now we've got three because of those pigtails and then these here on top these three black wires up here on top these all then go to the light fixtures and of course we've got our three ground wires our pigtails that were wire nutted together with the main ground and the grounds coming from the light fixtures themselves so now we just have to put our half circles in to all of these wires and we can start connecting it to the light switches and you can either use your wire strippers they usually have some holes in them to make your half curls but i usually just use some needle nose pliers as they also do a good job all right so i'll show you how to wire up this first light switch and then the switches after this are just going to be the exact same steps as we do on this first switch so the first thing we're going to hook up is this ground screw and something to know is anytime you're putting wiring on a switch or an outlet the wiring needs to be going in a clockwise direction around the screw whether it's the ground wire or the hot wire the load wire it doesn't matter any time that you're putting wiring around a screw on any kind of an outlet or switch it needs to be going around it in a clockwise direction so once you've got it on there just tighten it down nice and firm so it can't come off and then we're going to turn the switch over so that you can see this is going to be where all of our hot wires are so we'll take this first wire and loop it around the screw in a clockwise direction then tighten it down nice and firm then once you've gotten it tightened down nice and firm just give it a little tug make sure that it can't move at all and then we just do the same thing down here for this bottom terminal as well and then just repeat the process with your remaining switches all right guys so that's pretty much all there is to wiring up multiple switches with only one power source coming into the box i hope that maybe it cleared up some things for you as to how this all works and i hope that it was informative and you learned something new and if you did please let me know by leaving a comment down in the comment section and also giving the video a thumbs up and of course if you have any questions you can leave those down below in the comments as well and if you like how to's and do yourself type videos for around your home like we did here today i do a bunch of new projects and also show you how to do repairs and maintenance for around your house so consider hitting that red subscribe button down below and i hope to see you in the next video [Music]

Channel: How To Home

Views: 203,160

Rating: 4.9075146 out of 5

Keywords: how to wire 3 switches with one power source, Install multiple light switches, How to install 3 light switches with one power source, How wire multiple light switches with one power source, How to install multiple light switches, how to wire multiple lights on one circuit, how to wire a multi gang box, 2 light switches one power source, multiple light switches one line wire, how to install multiple light switches in one box

Id: HocLKQ-k91U

Length: 8min 2sec (482 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 03 2021