Switch Loops & Neutrals Explained & Best Practices

well hey thanks for stopping by today we're going to talk about a switch loop coming down from this light right above here a lot of times when you first pull light off the ceiling it's kind of just confusing looking so we're just going to talk it through and we'll show you what the different wires do so with this standard light being pulled off the ceiling you can kind of see right away why you might be confused we have several neutral wires or what appear to be neutral wires connecting onto the light and then up here in the ceiling we have our ground wires tied together that's normal you're always going to have all of your ground wires tied together and then your neutral wires would normally be tied together up there with a pigtail coming down to the light but we have these three white wires which is kind of strange or it looks strange at least now if we look at our black wires here momentarily if this was the end of the switch and we just had power coming up from our switch you just have a single cable coming in with one black wire going to one side and a white wire going to the other side so this appears to be using what we call a switch leg which is one 14 2 cable in this case since it's 14 gauge wire going down to the switch that switch would have a black and a white wire on it so let's start with the power where the power originates so we have power coming into this box on one of these black wires we don't really know which one has the power coming in but then we have power coming back out obviously so we have uh likely let's just say for example this black wire over here is the power coming in and then we have power going out on that center wire that's just going somewhere else where they're going to utilize that power and then this third one over here is connected you can see how the white wire right there is connected to this here that means that that's probably our switch leg so we have power coming from here going down this 14 2 wire then we'll go down to the switch here really quick and sure enough you can see here on the single pole switch we have a black wire feeding the feeding to the switch and then a white wire coming out now that white wire should have been marked with a piece of black tape which it was not unfortunately because that would have clarified things a little bit more for us so we know that we have power coming from this switch on that white wire and then that white wire ultimately feeds up to right there so we should put a little piece of black tape on that as well to indicate that that is a hot wire so now all of a sudden things become more clear now that we understand that we have a switch uh switch loop involved so the things that i would have done differently here are to tie these two neutral wires up in the box and then do use a pigtail coming down to the light instead of using these two screw terminals and then of course we would also mark this switch leg as being a hot wire with a piece of black tape both on this end as well as down by the switch the reason we're taking this all apart is we're actually getting rid of this uh temporary light and we're going to be moving all these wires into this recessed light here so we just had to kind of fully understand what was going on before we'd be able to move those wires over now one other thing that i thought of and i believe that there's a little bit of a i don't know if it's a code violation everywhere but this circuit right here we have this switch loop that we just talked about and this three-way switch is actually on a totally different circuit the power coming in and going out of this is coming from a different breaker than this one is so it's fine to have two circuits in one box but you need to provide a neutral for every switch in every switch box now this is kind of an interesting technicality because i believe we have a neutral i mean we do have a neutral but it's from the other circuit as far as i'm aware though we do not have a neutral for this switch leg so depending on where you are that may or may not be a code violation the reason that they require or suggest that you have a neutral wire present at every switch is so if you ever put like a wi-fi switch or a motion sensor switch or some other kind of switch in that requires a little bit of power in order to operate you have that neutral available so you can connect up that neutral and wire it properly otherwise people sometimes will connect to the ground wire for their neutral for their switch because it draws such a small amount of power which is not a good idea it's not allowed should not do that so always always provide a neutral at your light switch location which is why i suggest run your power to your switch box first and then run power from your switch box up to your light skip doing the switch legs or switch loops like they used to do very commonly i have a bunch more electrical videos coming from this project we've been working on here it's uh working on finishing a little basement living room area as well as a bedroom so there should be some fun videos coming from that oh also a sub panel let me show you really quick we also installed this sub panel over here this is a 100 amp sub panel so i'm going to have a detailed video for the on that for you guys too so make sure you're subscribed if you're not already so really appreciate it thank you guys for making this channel possible and for all your support appreciate it very much leave any thoughts or comments down in the description below and wow i just put a lot of call to actions in there but oh well thanks guys see ya bye

Channel: Benjamin Sahlstrom

Views: 97,696

Keywords: switch loop, wiring, electrical, residential, light switch

Id: Rwu5lM6blUA

Length: 5min 58sec (358 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 23 2019