Three Way Switch: Part 3 - Light Between the Switches

hey welcome back to part three of three-way switches in this video i'm gonna show you how to wire a three-way switch with the light in between your two switches this is gonna be commonly found in maybe a hallway stairwell maybe at a lot of commercial job sites so this is one of the most important ways to learn how to wire a through a switch because it is commonly seen in households or commercial settings so like i mentioned before your power is gonna be coming into this first three-way switch and then your light is gonna separate the two okay so you're always gonna have 14-2 coming in for from your home run so i have a black and a white right here and then in between the switches you always have 14 3 in between the switches okay so what you want to do first is you want to start with your hot wire your hot wire will always go to the common so we'll take that guy and connect them to that black terminal screw on your three-way switch next um your neutral wire you do not need a neutral at a three-way switch so you will just take those two neutral wires and you'll tap those two together okay the the black and the red are your traveler wires they're going to be communicating between the two switches so the black will go to one travel screw and then the red will go to the other traveler screw moving on this box seems to stump a lot of people um in this box it gets a little tricky because you have to re-identify a white wire okay so what we're going to do we're going to take your neutral wire this is not a motion sensor switch so we do not need a neutral wire at that switch so you'll take your neutral wire right there and you will take it straight to the silver terminal of the light okay the red wires they are your travel wires we're just going to tap those two together okay now we have um two blacks and a white left over okay this black must be the switch leg because you cannot have two white wires tied to the light okay so what we're going to do is we're going to take this black wire right here that is coming from your other three-way switch and we're going to take it and go to the gold terminal of your light and then we're going to take this black wire which is currently a traveler wire and we're going to attach it to this white wire right here okay so i know that's a little confusing that's a small box a lot of wires next one so we got a our last three-way switch this box is pretty easy we know as of right now this black wire is our switch leg so it's going to go to the common screw which is the black screw on your three-way switch we got a red traveler does not matter which travel screw you go to and then we have a re-identified white that is now a traveler so as you can see here's our problem we got our two switches right here and our light is going to be in the middle okay we'll have 14 2 coming in from our panel over here we'll have our 14 3 wires running in between our switches we're going to start with this first box right here on the left so this is our first box this is our power coming in our 14 2 wire okay i already have all the hooks and all the wires stripped i got the wire grounded just to kind of help this video go a little bit quicker um so this is my hot wire coming from the panel my black wire it is going to go to the black terminal of your three-way switch right there so make sure you put your hooks on clockwise and you'll just attach that hook to that black screw right there the next one is going to be your white wires okay your white wires you have your neutral wire and this is also going to stay as a neutral wire and you're just going to tap those together right there with a wire nut and then finally our 14 3 wires they are for our travelers for our switches to communicate it does not matter which hook you put on um or which color you put on the terminal on which side this is a um i'm putting the red on this gold traveler screw and then i'm gonna put the black on the other one okay so as you can see we got a traveler screw right there travel terminal and attach that hook to there this is our light box so in this scenario we are using a plastic light so you do not need this ground so you will just tuck that up in there if you're using a metal light then it'll have a ground wire or or a ground screw to attach to the light so as we talked about before in the wiring diagram um this white wire coming from our first switch is our neutral wire so that must go to the silver terminal of your light okay so the white wire is going to the silver terminal and that would be classified as our neutral wire the next one um on here is our red wire our red wire that is going to stay a traveler and we will tap it to the other red wire this black wire is going to have to attach to this white wire coming going that way this white wire is now begun going to be a traveler wire and then finally this black wire right here it is going to be our switch leg and it is going to attach to the gold terminal of your light all right so here's our last switch um on our last box the black wire is going to be our switch leg so it is going to the common screw next we have the white and red wires they are traveler wires and they will go to our two gold traveler screws and as you can see right here i already have my ground hooked up to the green ground screw

Channel: MC Construction Teacher

Views: 7,951

Keywords: Three way switches, Switches, Electrical, Light, 3 way, Wiring

Id: Ch3jC6LNifM

Length: 7min 36sec (456 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 09 2021