Hey friends welcome back to Grand Adventure! I'm your host Marc Guido,
and in this week's episode we're going to change out some of these really harsh dome lights
for some 12-volt RV pendant lights over our kitchen and our dining table, so stay tuned!
So we're going to walk you through this process step by step. It is surprisingly easy to swap out
12-volt light fixtures in your RV; however, as always we're going to throw a caveat out there.
If you do not feel comfortable doing this work, hire a professional. There is always a risk of
injury when you're working with electricity; however,
when you're working with 12-volt it's extremely low voltage, so the risk is much lower than if
you were working with 120 or 240-volt systems. Let me show you first what we're working with.
Just like most RVs these days, our fifth wheel ceiling is lined with these
inexpensive bright white LED dome lights that actually put off a rather harsh light.
Our plan is to replace the two that are over the kitchen sink island, and these
two over here above our dining table, with these glass pendant lights that we picked up online.
Unfortunately the seller didn't adequately protect the lights and two of the four arrived broken.
Patricia can be pretty amazing, however. The seller immediately made good and shipped out
two replacement lights, but we're anxious to get these installed and see how they look.
For a while Patricia made a hobby of doing mosaic, so she pulled out her mosaic glue
and set about reconstructing Humpty Dumpty. It was quite the jigsaw puzzle
but she somehow managed to pull it all together.
Zoe is clearly far more patient than I am.
Alright, so now the first step is to remove these and I've got to tell you, these things are tight.
They're so tight that I wasn't convinced that twisting them was in fact the way to get them off,
so I went online and checked with some folks and sure enough, you've got to give them a
quarter twist counterclockwise and then the three tabs that are holding these covers on release.
Alright, we got that one off and now it's just a matter of two screws that
are holding this thing in.
Of course I've got the wrong bit.
Now just pull it down, and there are just some cap end crimp sleeves that are holding these things
to the 12-volt system. Now you do have to keep in mind that unlike incandescent lights, LED lights
are sensitive to polarity so you have to make sure the positive is to the positive,
and the negative is the negative. You can't just swap the two.
I've got to use some needle nose pliers to pull these out of there because that hole is not very large.
There we go, we got one and you can see these are the
crimp sleeve connectors I was talking about. We'll end up clipping that off
to remove the old light. There's all kinds of other wiring in here.
There we go, there's the other one.
These can be a devil to get through these little holes.
There we go! Alright, so basically all we're doing is disconnecting these two
and connecting the two wires -- positive and negative -- from the new pendant lamps.
Alright, so we'll cut off the old lamp
and
we will cut the wires going into this crimp connector.
Oh man, I have a rather dull set of diagonals here and these are rather heavy gauge wires.
There we go, and one more ... there it goes, so ...
I'll take this and strip about a half an inch of bare wire
off each of these leads.
This is why I'm not an electrician!
There we go.
It's rather convenient the sink is right there to drop all my debris in.
This seems to be about 14 gauge, let's strip this one.
Okay, now let's grab our light fixture. These are already pre-stripped,
so we'll just kind of twist these together a little bit, grab a new crimp sleeve connector.
Make sure that's as far into that crimp sleeve connector as you can get it.
Make sure it's in there real good.
And we'll crimp it really well ...
Go a little further back to make sure we have a good crimp.
Give that a good solid squeeze.
And now gently pull on each wire -- yeah, we got a good crimp there.
And we're going to do the same thing with the other lead.
Okay, now that I've done the second set of wires
I'm just going to tuck everything back up in where it came from.
Now these particular lamps use a little mounting bracket that we're going to just use the
previous lamp's screws and put right here, so we'll get that drilled in.
Okay, there's one.
Okay, now ...
We've got two little cap screws that go over those studs once we put the lamp base up against the ceiling.
There we go! Then what I'm going to do, I'm just going to take later on -- not in this
video -- but I'm going to take some wood putty that's of a similar shade (if not I'll just
paint it) but to fill those previous lamp's holes which are wider than the base here.
I'll tighten these up with a little crescent wrench.
Okay, so let's go grab the lampshade.
Alright, now we'll just get the glass lampshade up there, and this particular lamp will be done
and we can move on to the other three.
This just screws on. Okay.
That's pretty solid. Now let's go hit the light switch and check our handiwork,
and see how this came out and ...
Voila! Oh yeah,
so now it's set about getting the other three done and we'll take a look at the finished product.
So there's the finished product! And quite frankly,
we're pretty pleased by this. I've got all the lights on because I'm filming, but
when you turn the overheads off it makes a real nice ambiance.
So just in case this has inspired you to swap out some of the 12-volt light fixtures in your RV,
there are plenty of choices out there on the Internet. You can Google around,
check etrailer.com, check Amazon. We got these from Johnson's Surplus in Michigan for $15 per
pair on these pendant lights. Now admittedly the shipping was slightly more than the lights
themselves. Even so, with the shipping it still turned out to be a great deal compared to some
of the other options out there. If you like this video please give us a big "thumbs up" down below!
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