Rewire an Electrical Switch box with No Neutral

hey guys in today's video I'm going to show you how I convert this switch that is currently controlling this outlet down here into a switch that will operate some new recessed lighting I'm about to install on the ceiling in this room so stick with me and I'll walk you through the process okay so before we get started this video will not touch on the actual installation of the recessed light if you want some more information about installing recessed lighting I have another video on my channel I'll put a link to it right here you could click that now to walk you through that entire process so our problem we have right now is that this box right here with the switches lacks a neutral wire I'm going to show you why that is and how we can go about fixing that so we get this to work for our project alright guys the first step I want to head down to the panel and I shut power off to the circuit so we can work on it safely and then went ahead it took the covers off both the outlet and the switch and then pulled both of them out of the boxes so we could have a better look at the wiring and what we have to do to modify it supply power to our new light okay so what exactly is the problem right now at the current configuration of this circuit what we have right now is a single piece of romex that is coming out of that outlet box down there now the way this works now is that this switch when it's off or on is controlling power down to that outlet there isn't any lighting in the ceiling in here and current code requires that a switch be placed in every room in your house that could control either lighting in the ceiling on our case and outlet so the idea is that you'd have a lamp plugged into that outlet down there and then the switch would function as a means of providing light in the room shortcut it is taking a lot of times it's not really a shortcut it's a common way of doing it because it saves wire is that they'll run a single piece of romex between both these locations when you have this setup and what they then do is they'll supply a 120 volts from that outlet box up to this switch and then depending on the location of switch if it's off rinoa and either be supplying or not supplying power down the other wire in that romex back down to that alley so even though you see a white wire in this box right now that white wire isn't representing a neutral technically speaking it was a poor job by the electrician that wired this house because he was required by code to indicate that this is no longer a neutral by putting a black piece of electrical tape on here or some type of label so unknowingly someone that doesn't have that much knowledge about electric can come in here and think this is a neutral when in fact when this switch is either off or on it could be Tonie volts present on it so that's something you always want to do if you start using any other conductors in your wire for hots other than the black you have to indicate that with tape or like I said a label okay so we're taking a look at the junction box right now at the outlet hopefully I could explain this a little better to you right now and how this is currently wired and what we're going to do to change it to make it work for our new lights alright so as you can see here here's our outlet right and then we have this wire nut over here that has two blacks coming in and also a white right and what they basically did was these two black wires come in to this box one of these is bringing power into the box from the source so this might be coming from the panel or it might be coming from another outlet somewhere in this circuit right so that brings power in to this box the other black wire represents the feed out of this box to the next device on the circuit so more than likely this other black wire depending on which one it is is going out in the room to the next outlet on the circuit giving that power alright okay the other wire under our wire nut is this white which is again supplying 120 volts or the hot leg up to our switch right now now again same scenario down here the electrician should indicated this is a hot wire now by wrapping a piece of electrical tape around your black piece of tape so again the unsuspecting I might think that this is a neutral it's not this is a hot as you can see right here it's tied into the two blocks under this wire not all right having a look at the outlet now the hot side of the outlet you can see there's only one wire coming in here this black wire right now is in the same piece of RoMac so the same sheathing as this white so the white again bring a power to the switch and the black in that same piece of romex is coming out and that's bringing power back down to the outlet depending on what location the switches on if it's off or on which is why there's not another wire connected underneath this screw right here okay that's why all the other hots under the wire nut this outlet is solely controlled by that switch okay if we flip this outlet around and have a look at the neutral side of it we have two white wires now one is the neutral supply to the outlet now we have a neutral coming out which is feeding the next device on this circuit which more likely is probably another outlet you'll see the ground over here really not going to be changing anything with this in terms of this circuit this is good they as is all right so rotating this back around here now what do we have to do to supply the switch with a neutral and a hot to feed our new lights the first thing we're going to do and again as I stated in the beginning this video oh this this power is off to the circuit right now so we have no risk of shock marking on this all right we're going to take this wire nut off you want to separate the white out of this nut and we're going to keep the two blacks together what we're then going to do is we're going to take that white and it's going to be connected to the whites on the side of the outlet here doesn't matter which one and what that will then do is bring a neutral up to our box now you really don't want to be connecting more than two wires to the side of this outlet here okay it's just not good practice so we're going to go ahead and do is when I take these two neutrals off and we're also going to take our new neutral that is currently a hot off this and we're going to connect those all together under a wire nut similar to this right now okay we're going to add a fourth wire to that and basically what the fourth wire is going to be as a jumper from that wire nut over to this outlet to give us a neutral here alright and what that's going to do is going to clean everything up on this outlet and will basically be a better way to secure all the cabling in the back of this box here and making sure we don't have any issues down the road all right what we're then going to do is very similar to the neutrals we're going to take our two hots and the current hot that is the return from the switch right now and connect all three of those together under this wire nut and also provide a jumper from this wire nut over to this outlet to give this outlet 120 volts so basically the neutral leg and the hot leg in this box I'm going to look pretty much the same they can have four wires on each of the wire nuts with one wire coming out to this outlet alright so what we basically then just did was kill two birds with one stone we supplied a hot and a neutral up to our switch for a new lighting circuit and we also supplied constant 120 volt power to this outlet so this outlet will no longer be controlled by the switch I'm going to show you guys all this how it's going to look when I'm done but again I just wanted to go through how we're going to be doing these changes I'll show you the changes up in the box as well when I run they do wire down there for the lights and all should be good when we're done okay guys I figured I'd speed the footage up here a little bit just keep the video moving along using a voltage sniffer here to verify that the voltage is in fact off better safe than sorry remove the wire nut and what we're going to do now is just separate all the hot conductors as they are currently configured here I'm just cutting off the wires at the back of the outlet the electrician originally used those stab block connectors which I really don't like so we're not going to use them again we'll remove the pieces later just showing you that the ground is going to be changed we're going to keep that as is and just trying to clean up the wires here a little bit you um you always want to try to separate all your wires meaning the whites and the blacks you really don't want them crossing over each other just try to keep everything neat here I'm just cutting all the wires to the same length makes it a little bit easier when we go to strip all the insulation off and tighten them together with the wire dikes in a few seconds here when there are all different lengths it just makes everything very difficult again you want everything to be clean and neat when you're done so all the wires folded nice okay so here's the two pigtails I made there's two short pieces of wire and what that's going to do is branch the wiring out from underneath the wire nuts in the back of the box over to the outlet to supply it power this is good practice what this prevents is if the outlet ever does fail you don't lose all the devices downstream of that outlet as well just the outlet will be offline okay so what you want to do now is take your wire dikes and just twist all those wires together real well you never want to solely rely on the wire nut itself to to keep everything together just give everything a good twist that way everything stays nice and secure doing the same thing here now for the neutral side so again real simple here we have just four hots and four neutrals in this box all connected together and that basically will complete the circuit the way we need it to now and here I'm just giving you a view of everything all done obviously the wire nuts aren't on yet we're going to get to that next okay and there are those wire nuts going on just a general note here you wanna make sure you screw these on good and tight you don't want any chance of them backing off I'm going to go ahead now and trim the individual conductors to length same goes here you want the the wires to be relatively the same length and strip off the insulation so it's easier to connect to the outlet take your needlenose put a nice J hook on the end of both those wires and that what I'm going to do here is remove those pieces of wire that is stuck in those stay block connectors so you just need a small slotted screwdriver you put them in the slots and the all those little pieces will pop right out okay so black hot wire goes to the gold screw the white neutral goes to the silver screw just make sure you put the wires under the screws the right way so that when you tighten the screw it actually pulls the wire into the connection alright so there's everything all wired ready to go fold up your wires nicely and put them into the back of the box and just screw your outlet in place put your cover plate back on and this outlet is good to go alright so up here at the switch now we're going to start preparing this for the rewire ripping off some tape on the switch here checking the power to make sure it is off and the switch was hooked up with those stea block connectors here as well so what I'm doing is I'm just using the screwdriver again to remove the two wires and we'll remove the screw and take the ground wire off as well that white wire that you see coming into the box the piece of romex with the insulation still on it that is the wire going up the wall to the new light so I'm going to go ahead and just strip that back now now I just want to note here the original wires the black and the white that you see on the top of the box right now those are the wires coming from the outlet we just rewired all right so I'm just going to separate everything out here now I'm going to twist the two ground wires together and we'll go ahead and snip one of those wires off and that individual ground wire now we'll go over to the new switch here I'm just cutting the conductors off again the same length to make it a little easier to twist everything together those two white wires now represent the neutral from the outlet and the neutral going up to the light so we're going to twist those together and install a wire nut okay same thing here the two hots I'm going to cut them to the same length and strip off the insulation now at this point I'm showing you the old switch what you would have here is just a feed in and a feed out and then the ground you can just connect those two the screws I am however using a dimmer switch now dimmers come pre-wired with pigtails same type of connection it's just interrupting the hot leg so one wire goes to the one black wire on the switch and the other black obviously goes to the other black it doesn't matter which wire goes to which pigtail right and onion we're just going to wire nut everything together all right and give you a close up here now of everything so we have a hot coming in a hot going out our ground and our neutral pigtail all right fold everything nice and neat back into the box now I'm going to go ahead and install the new dimmer switch drive the screws into the box put our new cover plate on alright so I'm going to go ahead and turn the power back on to the circuit now that the wiring is complete we're going to check to make sure everything works check the outlet make sure we have 120 volts here we're going to go ahead and try the lights and that's pretty much going to wrap up this installation so if you found this video informative I appreciate it if you give the like button a tap got any questions or comments post them down below and I'll see you guys on the next one

Channel: Fix It With Zim

Views: 366,384

Rating: 4.7526145 out of 5

Keywords: electrical, light switch, neutral wire, no neutral wire, romex, diy, recessed lights, high hats, hi hats, junction box, outlet, receptacle, switch controlling an outlet, drywall, sheetrock, old work box, new work box, how to identify a neutral wire, smart switch no neutral wire, tp link light

Id: -ictADG2xQw

Length: 13min 27sec (807 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 30 2016