How To Wire A Single Pole Light Switch

hi I'm Shannon from host improvements comm and in today's video I just want to show you how I would wire a lighting circuit I've got a couple examples here and this is with single pole switches it's important to remember that not every zone or area or part of the world follows the same electrical code so it's important to check with your local you know code advisory boards or whoever pull your permits that you need all that kind of stuff if you're gonna do this project as a DIY err because in some areas they won't allow you to do it as a homeowner and you have to hire an electrician and by all means if you're not comfortable with what you know anything that I show you here hire an electrician because this can be life-threatening so a little disclaimer there so anyways back to the lighting circuits that we've got here mocked up on this board as I mentioned they're both these are two different examples they're both for single pole switches so that means that the lighting circuit can only be controlled by one switch okay you don't have a switch or two switches in different locations that control it just one switch and again this is one example this is another way the reason there I've got two examples is because there's two ways you can do this you can do it we're gonna start at the top you can do it where the power supply which is this brown line is coming to the switch before it goes to any lights okay so that's one way of doing it so you've got your power coming in also one new regulation that many areas are following now as well as making sure that you've got a neutral wire at the switch location at every switch location so that's the way I've done this one up so you've got power coming in which if we look inside here that's this line right here to the switch and I've got the power disconnected just so you know because you don't want to be touching this if you got light power okay so power coming in when the switch is tripped the power would then go through this other black wire around here and to your first first light now at the first light for this type of light you normally would have it pigtailed pigtailing is a matter of putting your positive wires together and then just allowing an extra loop coming out to hook to the actual lighting and all this does is if there's a problem in this light down the road power would still continue on to all the other lights if we simply came into the light right on its mounting screws and then left the light if something happened here there's a chance that if this light buggered up and everything down the road is gonna possibly not work so so pigtailing kind of gets you around that okay so here's one light I said the here's the power coming to the light right here's our neutral obviously now because our power supply coming from the switch is here and it's meted together that means it's automatically going through this black wire which is continuing on down the line to any other lights you have your very last light on the line basically you're just going to have black going your hot wire going to the to the hot terminal or hot wire and then your neutral going to the neutral okay now also as important as anything is all the grounding needs to be correct so if you look in every box there's a ground wire coming out from the supply and it's going to be hooked to any other ground wires that are coming into that box and the ground wires are these bare wires back here normally they won't have any kind of plastic on them if they do it might be green but generally they're gonna be bare this bare copper you see right here if I can pull it oh okay so that's your ground wire so any grounds coming into junction boxes or electrical boxes like this need to be twisted together some areas might ask for them to be added as well or a wire or not like this and they also should be attached to the box itself now on a lighting circuit in most areas the ground does not have to be hooked to the switch but again just depending where you are yours may have to be in our case it doesn't need to be grounded to the actual switch okay so that's in there in a lighting circuit this type of light here doesn't actually get the ground attached to it all the grounds are in the box and and hooked together as well as hook to the walks through one of these grounding screws here some boxes will actually have a green screw and these are just zinc on a typical light fixture you know fit a fixture that you have finished in your home though it's going to have either ground wire usually green coming off of it or a terminal to hook to that's ground this just being a basic socket doesn't actually have a grounded position okay so that's that one there again I didn't go into any detail on how your wiring actually is run stapled all that kind of stuff yeah basically all you need to know for this in general is you should have fourteen to wire 14 gauge to wire and that's pretty standard but again check your your local codes okay so that's this example here was power coming in it's been originating at the switch this example down here we've got power coming in originating at the end light the last light on your circuit okay so again this is a little bit different because we've got fourteen two coming in as a power supply and that's one of these black lines here so that's my actual positive power here's the neutral so as the power comes in we've actually got to send it all the way to the switch before it gets to any light so really the black current is going to follow through or the positive current I mean it's going to follow through the black wires the way I've done it all the way back to wherever your switch is and then once it comes to the switch and the switch gets turned in my example the power is going to enter the lights in a red wire okay so that means we're going to need three wire fourteen three cable from the switch between all the boxes in order to do that so we have enough cables in there to do it okay so simply black is coming in as power it's leaving this first light it's going to the next light it's it's passing or bypassing the light again because we just we got to get it to the switch first way it goes over to the switch here it is coming into switch and I'd be in the off position so powers coming in from the source switch the switch now it can come back and head back to all the lights in the red wire so it's coming in here we've got a pigtail it this could be red wire it doesn't really matter I've just had block so that's what I use so pigtails over to the light this other the second red wire is going back to another light or whatever so and then at your very last one it's very similar like what we had up top you just need a hot wire and a neutral wire and everything's done and same idea all your grounds are always done basically the same way okay and as I mentioned on the above example you can see here we've brought the neutral line as well all the way over to the switch so we had neutral here and they just simply loop through and we've got a neutral over here and the the reason for that is if you ever add a dimmer timer or something like that most of them require a neutral soul so that's a rule that is needed in some areas no so really simple so I'll just plug this sample board in I guess I had the switch on up there on both of them so we've got our switches functioning you can see okay just gonna unplug that again so again whenever you're doing electrical make sure you have the breaker off in fact usually the the supply to the to the breakers the last thing I'd ever hook up so but for sure if you're changing a ball or changing a switch just make sure your power is is turned off at the rate at the breaker box okay so I think that's basically time to wrap things up as always we love it if you click the little thumbs up icon there on the bottom of the screen if you like what we did that helps out our ratings quite a bit you can check 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Channel: HouseImprovements

Views: 1,656,188

Rating: 4.916471 out of 5

Keywords: diy, how to, home, house, improvements, electrical, wiring, circuit, help, how-to, receptacle, black, red, 110v, 120v, 240v, 220v, led, incandescent, switch, single, dual, double, pole, box, electricity, electric, household, permit, upgrade, modify, light, lite

Id: PXRqaDX7A3A

Length: 8min 56sec (536 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 23 2017