How to wire a light switch

hey guys in this video I thought that I would show you the basic steps in wiring a light switch the first thing that you want to make sure that you do is to turn off the power anytime you're working with electricity this particular switch it's a new installation I know the power is off sorry about the lighting I'm actually using my shop light to provide light right now this is going to be the first light circuit in this shop and what we have here is our box we have our line coming from our breaker as well as our line going up to the lights and what I'm going to do now is basically strip the insulation off of the romex there's a couple of ways you can do it you can either take a knife and split it and then pull it back or you can use a set of romex strippers like this to score the wire that's what I'm going to use on this the way that these work is that the shape of the wire if you can see it there in the camera will match the shape of the cutter and these are designed to cut through the insulation the outer sheathing of the wire and let you pull that straight off so that's what I'm going to go ahead and do now see once you score the wire you simply call that insulation there that covering completely off do that for both of your cables just like that I like to trim these wires back slightly there's a little too much sticking out of the box this was actually the leftover from the role that I had so I didn't necessarily trim it up as far as I could have so now what I'm going to do is to remove the cardboard covering that is over the bare ground we're going to be using these grounds for the switch we're actually going to be making a joint with these I like to separate my wires out just a little bit now our ground we do not need as much on one of these as we have on the other so I'm just going to trim it short what we're actually going to do now is twist our ground around like this the shorter one against the longer one then we're going to take the ground wire none of these are a little different than just a regular wire nut of course they're green in most cases this one has a hole in the top of it and what that is for is you can see we slip that onto our ground wire and then we can run it down to where those two meet and then tighten it up and what that's going to allow us to do is that's going to give us the wire that we need to connect onto the ground lug on the switch so we're going to run this all the way down you don't have to over tighten them but you do want to make sure that it's good and snug and the next step is going to be our neutrals our white wire is our neutral wire in an AC circuit so simply going to strip the wire just like that and again I will leave links to these strippers down in the comment section below and since this is just a simple 110 light our neutrals are actually just going to get tied together you can use pliers for this I've just done so long with my hands I've just kind of gotten used to it put your neutrals together put just a regular wire nut on it as you can see there it's just a red wire nut nothing too fancy about it snug it up good you want to make sure that it won't pull out and we're just going to take our neutral kind of push it back out of the way now we're going to strip the black wire which is our hot for this circuit and for this particular switch that I'm using I'll be making a loop in the wire now you can get some that have lugs in the back that will make it a little easier for you that you can put the wire in and then tighten the lug down but these are some that I had leftover from a contractor pack that I had bought when I wired my house so I'm gonna go ahead now and just make a loop just grab it toward the end and just twist it around slightly there's a same with this one just like that we're also going to do the same with our ground I'm just gonna twist that down a little bit now our ground is going to go right here this green screw on our switch is going to be where we connect our ground and then our two blacks are going to go to the two brass terminals on the other side of the switch so that's what we're gonna do now I'm gonna start with the ground I always like to put the wire the loop through this to wear as I tighten that screw that it basically clenches down on that it's like it's trying to draw itself up on the wire and you can see that this is just slightly in there I like to take a pair of pliers mostly my strippers do great for this and just grab that ground as well as the others and just give it just a little bit of a crimp just kind of kind of just squeeze it around that you can see that it's not going to come out very easily now I'm going to tighten it down and for that I'm just using my drill and a square bit this is just a Dewalt drill I've had for a while it is a great drill I will drop a link down in the description below for this and we're just going to Snug this up see how that wants to pull up you want to make sure that all of that is connected just like that now we don't have to worry about that going anywhere and we're ready to connect our two hots or our two blacks so I'm going to pull these over just try to get this out of the way a little bit and first one and again I'm going to squeeze that down slightly just to my opinion that makes a little bit better joint when you run those down I'm gonna take my drill just run that down on it you don't want to get too aggressive with it the reason I use my drill is when you're doing a hundred of these things using a screwdriver for all of these gets a little bit annoying it'll wear your hand out pretty quickly so work smarter not harder here we're tying on this one crimping it down same way and running it down what you want to make sure that you do not do is let that bare ground come around and touch any of these connections when you power your circuit up it will trip that breaker you hope rather quickly so what I'm going to do now is just work this back into the box just slowly folding the wires there you don't want to get too aggressive with it but just fold the wires up slightly and when you get to where you can start the screws in the holes I'm coming back in with my drill again it makes it a little easier run the screws up you don't want to run one of them up all the way you want to run both of them up kind of even you also want to kind of watch your switch to make sure that it's going in fairly straight just like that all right our switch is in place but we're not finished the next step is installing cover nothing more aggravating than going somewhere and seeing a cover missing from a light switch or from a plug they're very inexpensive and it just takes a few minutes to put these on take a number to get the screws out of the bag and it does - put these on in most cases take my cover you see the holes here in the switch will correspond to the holes in the cover so I simply set cover up there and you don't want to lose the screws try to keep from but it gets aggravating I have had to open another cover just to get screws out of them before if you do any kind of electrical work for any amount of time that will happen to you but you want to try to minimize it that way you're not wasting a cover but it does happen and it is not difficult to wire a light switch not difficult at all so tighten it up all right guys now for the moment of truth we're going to turn our power on to the circuit and test out our light there we go and that is how you wire light switch guys if you liked the video I would appreciate it if you would give it a thumbs up also be sure to subscribe check out the other videos in my electrical series and thanks for watching we'll see you next time again check out the description for links to all the tools that I use might make it a little easier for you thanks for watching we'll see you next time

Channel: Beyond the Boom

Views: 405,946

Rating: 4.8613591 out of 5

Keywords: electrical, how to wire a light switch, how to wire a light switch to a light, how to wire a light switch with 3 wires, how to wire a light switch to multiple lights, how to wire a light switch to a light fixture, how to wire a light switch circuit, how to wire a light switch off an outlet, wiring a light switch, wiring a light switch and outlet, wiring a light fixture, wiring a light fixture with 3 sets of wires, light switch wiring, light switch wiring diagram

Id: Vl9XkXR5Kgs

Length: 11min 28sec (688 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 09 2018