Let There Be Light

So after church I worked on the ceiling lamp in the library. To quickly recap yesterday's findings, there are three wires: red, black and white. It's obviously been wired for a ceiling fan. After my testing yesterday I found that current was on the combination of white and red wires and the combination of black and white wires. I also determined that I could control the current by using the light switch (and right there is the rub, but more on that later).

The amount of time it took to fix the light was about 20 minutes. The amount of time I spent arguing with Ginger before fixing the light was about an hour. See, we were never able to determine which switch at the electrical box turned off power to the library. And after resetting almost all the clocks in the house multiple times, I decided we didn't need to turn the power off there. After all, it was already off because of the light switch. Ginger went on and on about how dangerous what I planned to do was and I was going on and on about how I was being very careful and I kept harping on the whole "there's no power with the light switch turned off". So eventually we talked to her Dad, who agreed with me (yay) and I went ahead and finished putting up the lamp and used the comment to yesterday's post from Kenny about using the white and black and just terminating the red wire. All well and good.

So once I got everything connected I went and got a light bulb and screwed it in and it came on immediately. This was a bit of shock to me (not a physical shock), because the light switch was still in the off position. So I toggled the light switch, and the light stayed on. So I toggled all the light switches in the room and the light stayed on. I toggled all the switches in the adjacent rooms and still the light stayed on. So apparently I had indeed been working with live wires and I owe Ginger an apology because she was in fact completely right that I should have turned off power at the fuse box. *

As I took everything back apart, I retested the connections. And yep, the white / black combination was always showing current independent of the light switch. However, the red / white combination was controlled by the light switch. Apparently yesterday when I was doing my testing with the light switch I tested the red / white combination, saw it wasn't on when the light switch was off and just assumed that the same would be true for the black / white combination. I guess the black / white is supposed to be used for the fan part of a ceiling fan so that you could turn it on and off via the pull cord or something independent of the lights and the white / red combination was for the lights which was controlled by the switch.


So I reversed stuff and terminated the black wire and used the red / white combination and lo and behold we now have a ceiling lamp in the library that actually works. We removed the covering from the light switch too in case people are wondering, and the color of the wires coming off of there are all white and black (so even had I done that beforehand I would have made the wrong choice about the wires since I hadn't fully tested the combinations properly). I can only assume that someone must have crossed the colors of the wires as they go to the ceiling (I believe Ray once said crossing the streams was bad).

* Ginger, I was wrong and I'm sorry. **

** Actually, I blame Kenny for his comment stating the wrong combination of wires. Had he mentioned the correct wires to use, I would have never even known there was a constant live wire (not sure if that's good or bad though).