How To Wire A 3-Way Light Switch - 3 Way Switch Explained (2 EASY & SIMPLE Methods)

in this video i'm going to show you two different ways to wire these three-way switches to power this light up here beside me if you're new to this channel my name is josh this was all about building your own house saying a ton of money so be sure to subscribe ring that bell so you get notification every time we release new video and hammer that like button for me that's all i ask return for making this video so i got a lot i want to go over today so let's get started the most important part to doing electrical work is safety so the first thing i do is identify the circuit i'm going to be working on come to the panel box locate the breaker that powers that circuit then click it off and then after that you're ready to go and i always double check to make sure there's no power going to the switch box or outlet i'll be working on and if you're not comfortable with electrical work do not do your own electrical work be sure to hire a professional all right so let's go ahead and wire that three-way switch another important note to safety is try to wear safety glasses when you're doing your wiring these wires are very sharp and they can easily poke you in the eye all right so what i did here is set up a rough demonstration on how to wire a three-way switch now i'm going to show you the two most common ways that i've found a wire three-way switch that's easy to understand so there's several ways to do this but again i'm going to show you the two most common and the ones i've done that's worked well for me so what i got here is a 12-2 wire coming up and out of this box and this is going to act as the power to power this circuit and then i leave about six inches out from the box and that way it gives me plenty to work with and when it comes to hooking up to the switch and then i got a 12 3 wire running from switch box to switch box right here and it's coming up exiting right here and then it exits this switch box right here and then i'm hooked to a 12 2 wire that's hooked to the light that's going to be powered ultimately by this 12 2 wire so it's going to run in a circuit like this and again the 12 3 is going to act as the travelers so i'm going to show you the details on how you hook your three-way switch up to these switch boxes so as you noticed already i'm sure is each switch box has a 12-3 wire coming into it and a 12-2 wire coming into it so they both are wired the same even though this goes up to the light and this one is the power coming in so if you take a look at the 12 3 wire there's actually four wires total because it has a ground so you got your white you got your red you got your black and then you got your ground wire so even though it's 12-3 just remember there is a ground attached and the same with the 12-2 wire you got the white the black and then the ground and the white is your neutral the black is your hot and then the ground is your ground obviously and then this red and black wire in the 12 3 acts as the travelers so this red's a traveler and then this black's a traveler and then the same with over here this red is the traveler and then this black is the traveler so just so you know how to identify the wires so the first thing i'm going to do is take a pair of wire strippers and go ahead and strip each one of these always take about 5 8 of an inch off from each wire now i'm going to use these copper crimp sleeves as you can see they're these little cylinders that look like that and they're going to go over the grounds and crimp together so i'll show you how to do that all you got to do is separate your grounds here together and then kind of put these wires to the side and then just put them together with each other and then slide the crimp sleeve over it it's very straight forward and then what you need to do is take a pair of wire cutters that have plier ends on them or just a regular pair of wire pliers and then squeeze it together really tight and then twist until the grounds are placed together in a nice twisted fashion there and now what we need to do is clip the one wire back because we only need one of these ultimately and then we'll go ahead and bend that over and then crimp that piece down so now our grounds are tied together here in this box so we got to do the same in this box so we're going to put these together slide the crimp sleeve over it and then always slide it back until it's just flush with the box roughly and then crimp it really tight just like we did the other one and twist it together and then just clip one of these back and then fold it over and then squeeze it really tight again all right now that we got our grounds addressed it's time to address these white wires which is our neutrals so let's get those together and now with these all we got to do is take a pair of pliers and twist these together similar to how we just did the grounds except we're going to be putting a wire nut on this end so now we just take a wire nut after we got our neutrals twisted together and then go ahead and tie those together with the wire nut to secure it ultimately then always give the actual wires a couple twists so they stay together really tight and then i'm going to just fold those up nice and neat into the box and that we are done with the white wires and now we'll do the same on this other switch box all right so now we're going to fold that into the box just like the other one and get that back out of the way and then the next thing we need to do is put hooks on all these wires so the ground needs a hook to hook to the switches the blacks need a hook to hook two switches and then the reds so in order to do the hooks my personal preference is to use needle nose pliers all you got to do is grab the very end of the wire squeeze it really tight and just give it a nice sharp hook right like that not very complicated but that's what goes around the screws to the three-way switches now i just push the ground wire back into the box and leave a little bit sticking out here so now i'm going to take the camera up close to this particular switch box and just so you see in detail how to wire it before i secure the wires to the switch i just want to show you the parts to identify so if you look at these two gold screws here at the bottom those are for our travelers so the 12 3 wire is going to hook to these terminals so the is going to go here black's going to go here and then this black screw up here is for our common wire which is the black wire that's coming out of the 12 2 wire and then this is for our bare copper which is the ground wire which is the ones that we twisted together with the crimp sleeve so now that we identified the terminals on the switch now we just need to make the actual connection so this is off the 12-2 wire going up to the light and then here is the common screw that's going to hook to and then as you can see here this turns clockwise to tighten so we want to make sure to bring our wire in from the top and loop around so when you tighten it gets pulled towards the switch and not away so which that's very important so you get a good connection so we're going to take our hook and hook it around in that fashion and then what we're going to do is go ahead and tighten that down like so and you just want to snug these up really well and make them tight but you don't want to risk stripping out the actual screw so we're going to go ahead and get that on snug and we're good and it's very important to keep these snug you don't want these loose because it can cause arcing so it's very dangerous if you have arcing because that can cause a fire so just so you know make sure you tighten these screws down tight so these are our traveler wires and we're going to hook these up to the bottom terminals i like to just place the red wire here on the side that has the common so i'm going to go ahead and place that on that terminal and now on this side is our other traveler location that we need to place it so as you can see it tightens that way so we need to loop kind of down and around on this one and then we need to place the ground on the ground terminal i just wanted to show you a close-up view of what it looks like inside the box up in here we got the 12-2 coming out and then hooking to the common and then our 12-3 is here and there's the red going to this actual traveler terminal and then this black's going to the other traveler terminal so just so if you couldn't see while i was filming where what was going where that's what it looks like all right and now that we are all connected to the switch all we got to do is fold those up into the box nice and neat and just give it a nice fold down and up so now that that's folded in there all we got to do is take a number two phillips screwdriver and then tighten down the screws to secure the switch to the switch box and you would really only secure this after the drywall's up but this is for demonstration purposes so i figured i'd go ahead and do this and now that these are tightened up just got to do the same exact setup to this switch here so in this other switch box it wires almost exactly the same other than this is the 12 2 wire coming in which is the power and then this is the 12 3 coming in which is going to act as a travelers but you still just hook this common wire up to this common screw and then this bare copper wire is for the ground and then these are the travelers so i'm just going to go and hook these up [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] all right so i just kicked the breaker on let's see if it works awesome this switch is working and this switch is working very nice so as you can see works no problem you can kick it off or on from either switch and now i'm going to show you the other way to wire a three-way switch so this is the second way i like to wire a three-way switch and again this is just two of several ways you can wire a three-way switch but with this example i got a 12-2 coming up as the power source coming to this first switch box and then it runs over to this second switch box using a 12-3 wire in the last example it was 12 2 coming from the switch box up to this light but this time we have the 12 2 coming from the switch box up to the light so we got three wires in this switch box so i had to upgrade the switch box to a 22.5 so that's a little bit bigger switchbox so it can handle more wires so that's something you want to keep in mind too is your box fill so if you want to check out the card up here in the top right hand corner of the screen that's how you calculate box fill all right so let's go ahead and get to wiring this switch this is the 12 2 wire going up to the light this is the 12 3 wire going over to the other switch box and this is the 12 2 wire coming in as our power so first thing i need to do is tie all my grounds together so i'm going to go ahead and separate all the wires away from each other and i repurposed the last wires to do this demonstration so that's why they're a little chewed up looking so to speak but anyhow you'll still understand how i'm going to do this so first put all my grounds together if you notice this one's short because i had to cut it for the last demonstration but anyhow they tie together the same way as they did the first time so i'm just going to use a copper crimp sleeve slide it over the grounds and then get it over this last ground and you can also use the green nut it has a hole in the middle of it and what that's for is the same thing tying the grounds together except it has a hole in the middle of it that you can fish the uh one wire through so you can use those if you want but these copper crimp sleeves are a little cheaper and work just as well so go ahead and get all these bent together so again just crimp it down really tight then twist all the grounds together all right and then go ahead and bend back that short one then we'll cut one of these it doesn't matter which one and then just because we only need one wire coming out for the ground we'll fold that back and fold that one back all right so that's all there is for the ground tying together so now we got to tie these two white wires together so we do not tie the white wire coming from the 12 3 wire in this case this time it's just the power source and the light is going to be tied together white wire wise anyway so we're going to tie these neutrals together and we just take a wire nut just like we did in the first example tie those together and now give that a couple good twists and now our neutrals are taken care of again this is the light and the power source neutrals so we're going to go ahead and fold those back into the box get those out of the way and now what we need to do is take the black wire from the three wire that's going to the other switch and the black wire that is our power source and now those need tied together so we'll go ahead and twist those together now these two can be placed back into the box so this is the black wire going up to the light this is the red wire from the three wire and then this white wire we got to do something a little special with it that's coming from the three wire we got to put black electrical tape around it because that labels it as a hot wire and now with that white wire coming from the three wire go ahead and put a nice little hook on that because that's going to have to hook to our switch so now we need to put a hook on our ground as well because that's also going to hook to the switch now we got to hook it to our three-way switch so this is going to hook in a little different looking fashion anyways than what the last one did so we're going to go ahead and hook our black wire that's coming from the light to the common terminal at the top of this three-way switch so we'll go ahead and do that and next i'm going to go ahead and just hook the ground up just to get it out of the way and it goes onto the green screw like normal and now the white wire that's labeled with the black electrical tape that's coming from that 12 3 wire that's going to the other switch it hooks to this traveler terminal and now the red wire coming from the three wires going to the other switch hooks onto the opposing traveler terminal so it looks like that and now we can go ahead and fold that up into the box then we'll address the other switch so now i'm going to hook these wires to actual switch so as you can see we got a black red white and a ground and it's the end of the three wire so i'm just going to hook the black wire to this black common screw so we'll go ahead and hook that on in a fashion to where it tightens down towards the switch instead of away so we're going to loop around the top here so we'll go ahead and get that hooked and then tighten that down and now we just hook this red wire down below it to the traveler terminals and then we need to go to the other side and we'll hook our ground to the green ground screw here and then our white wire we are going to hook it to this terminal but we got to label it with electrical tape first to identify it and now we go ahead and hook that to the bottom traveler terminal here so it should look something like this we got our black going to the black terminal here and then we got our red going to this traveler terminal and then we got our white marked with the black tape going to this other traveler terminal then we got our bare copper going through the ground terminal now we just anchor that in the switch box just like we did before all right i just kicked the breaker back on let's test it out first switch works well second switch works well and then it looks like we are good to go so that is the second way i like to wire three-way switches be sure to check out my amazon store some of the products i use while making this video can be found there the link is in the description below and if you do make a purchase i get a small commission but it's at no extra cost to you and it helps support the channel and i appreciate that and this channel is all about building your own house so when i say building your own house i mean from the foundation up you can find how-to videos on pretty much the whole process and i'll be covering flooring and trim here in the near future so be sure to subscribe and ring that bell so you get all the notification when i release the video and i want to say thanks a lot for watching to all my faithful subscribers you have built this channel to what it is today and i want to say thank you for that and i really do appreciate that all right guys i got a lot of work i got to get done yet so let me turn the lights off and i'll see you in the next video have a good one

Channel: The Excellent Laborer

Views: 900,587

Keywords: 3 way switch, three way switch, wiring a 3 way switch, how to wire a 3 way switch, how to wire a light switch, 3 way switch wiring, how to, switch, 3-way switch, light switch, how to wire 3-way switches, how to wire, 3 way light switch wiring, 2 way switch, 3 way, two way light switch wiring, how to wire a three way switch, how to install a two way light switch, how to wire 2 way switch, wire a 3 way switch, how to wire a 3 way light switch, excellent laborer

Id: Qgr2OS-OVzo

Length: 20min 37sec (1237 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 21 2021