this video continues a series of videos i've done looking at the connections within a ceiling
rose and pendant and within a light switch and in my last video in this series we looked
at future proof in the switch and to future proof it we added a three core from our ceiling
rose and pendant down to here rather than our traditional twin and CPC cable that meant
that we had a neutral at the switch and again this is a odd looking switch if this is the
first time you've come into this video so i recommend you check out the video that i've
already made and i'll leave that in the eye above my head so this switch now is a standard
switch but has a neutral connection in it so meaning that we've future-proofed it from
the point of view that if the customer wants to have a smart switch and that smart switch
requires a neutral we've actually got a neutral at the switch even though the ceiling rose
and pendant we've used the three plate method of wiring however it's often in new installations
now they take the feed directly to the switch something that i call the two plate method
and by doing it in that method it means automatically you will have a neutral at the switch i'm
going to change all my connections in the ceiling rose and pendant and the light switch
to show you that two plate method i'm going to show you that you can also future-proof
that system by adding a slightly different cable into it in this video so change it over
to a completely different wiring system this is the two plate method and again if you're
unfamiliar with this i've got a lot of videos in a playlist called taking the feed to the
switch and i recommend you work your way through them but let's just have a quick overview
of what's happening so now at the switch i've got two one millimetre squared twin and CPC
cables coming in one of the cables brings in a brown permanent line connection the neutral
and the CPC and that's bringing the feed or supply into the switch and then we've got
a cable going out so out of L1 we've got a switching line out of the connector block
we've got a neutral and a CPC that goes off to the lighting point so we look at the connections
in the lighting point here we've got our CPC connected as we've always done inside of the
earth terminal within here now slight difference now because we don't have to put any sleeving
on the brown conductor coming in is actually a switching line and can go here in the connector
block of two and then we've got our neutral represented by an N here for our neutral and
as always i've disconnected the outgoing terminals which would be if we look here the flex that
goes down to say the pendant so we can see the block of two we like to leave the outside
ones ready for the switching line down to the to the lamp and the neutral so that's
uh the connections in those so just pull back this is great when you undo it so you undo
one of these in the ceiling you think it's oh lovely i've got to change the light fitting
maybe for a fancy light fitting and you've only got the three connections switching line
neutral and the circuit protective conductor however what if you unscrewed this ceiling
rose because you wanted to say put a light into a roof space or go from here to a lighting
extension all of a sudden you haven't got what you really need and that's the permanent
line connection so you've got a switching line but you haven't got that permanent line
to go to the next area whether it be the roof space or an extension so surely there's a
way of future-proofing the ceiling rose so we've future-proofed the switch because we've
got a neutral so if this switch was changed in the future to a smart switch we have a
neutral so that's brilliant but when we come back to look at the ceiling rose and pendant
we can't actually take a supply to another room we could take a feed to another light
that comes on at the same time and we've looked at that in videos as well if we come off here
with our switching line neutral and CPC to another light in the same area they would
come on together but we certainly couldn't take a feed to another room and obviously
install a new part of a lighting circuit so how can we overcome it it's simple hopefully
you've realized from our previous video what you could do this cable here that goes between
the light and the switch is obviously under floors chased into walls etc so it's quite
an effort to pull that one cable in but wouldn't it be more beneficial if that cable was a
three core in CPC from the switch to the lighting point so if we bring a three core in we would
have that spare core that would become our permanent line connection then when we got
to this lighting point and wanted to extend the circuit we would have the permanent line
neutral and a CPC that would require us to carry the system onto another area so what
i'm going to do now is i'm going to take out the twin and CPC cable here from this ceiling
rose and pendent and i'm going to replace it with a 3 core and then we'll look at the
connections both in the ceiling rose and pendant and into the light switch itself to see how
we're going to connect that 3 core and CPC to make sure we future-proof this time the
lighting point by having a permanent line at it so we can extend the circuit so during
the first fixed stage rather than pulling in a twin and CPC cable from the light switch
to the lighting point so chasing walls lifting floorboards as we said before all that effort
let's not do that let's just pull in a three core and CPC cable same effort same balls
to chase same floorboards to lift but it will give us the option of having that additional
conductor at this lighting point previously we were missing the permanent line connection
we only had the switching line neutral and CPC so if we look at the connections now that
we've got to make we've got to decide which cable is going to be for which of those line
switching line and neutral so let's have a have a think about it from previous videos
let's start with the neutral we said in previous videos the temptation probably is to go for
the black because black pre 2004 was the colour of neutral but we're trying to de-neutralize
black so the industry said we're not going to use that as best practice we're going to
use one of the other colours well i'd like to think that we've not going to be using
the brown one as our neutral and it obviously leaves the grey conductor left over so we're
going to use our grey as our neutral connection we're going to use the black as our switching
line connection and we need to identify it appropriately as we will the grey which will
become our neutral and then we've got a permanent line connection that we didn't have before
that we can insert into our loop therefore when anyone unscrews this and wants to extend
the circuit on they will have that connection so let's start off by dressing and putting
in our grey conductor as our neutral need to identify as a neutral so we bring in our
blue sleeve in i've just got to work out the length of that approximately in order that
we can make our connection i'm not going to double it over into here i know that's odd
and anyone's seen any of the other videos i've done i said it's very rare that i double
over into a ceiling rose and pendant now there's three to choose from we said we'd like to
leave the outside ones for the flex so it doesn't matter which of the two that are classes
are neutral the little neutral the n is there for our neutral symbol so we've got three
to choose from i'm just going to pop it into there just going to dress it round and we're
going to have our neutral connection in like there so i've got to try and keep out the
way of the camera as we do this one up so i'll join that one up and dress it to suit
so our grey one becomes our neutral we said that our black one is going to be our switching
line connection so we're going to do that as our switching line and that is our permanent
line so i'll put my permanent line in next i've got three to choose from so it doesn't
matter where i go out of those three trim that back and just strip off the outer PVC
and if you've watched some of these videos previously you'll notice i'm not using my
knife now partly because i'm no longer at the college and i can use some better tools
that we never had at college so we're going to insert that one into the block of three
in the loop and it doesn't matter which one of those three that i go into in order to
make my connection a little bit difficult to undo my screw with the camera in the way
just pop that one in there and i'll tighten that one down for my loop so that's now the
conductor that i didn't have previously so connect that one in so that's my loop connection
i've got a neutral and now i've got my switching line which is my black which is going to come
down to this side but i need to identify as a switching line conductor so i need to put
on my brown sleeve in and that becomes that one i just need to strip it back i need to
try and make that connection as well i'm gonna pop it in got two to choose from we always
leave the outside one free into there for my connection hopefully i can tighten that
one up okay so we've got our connections in so we've got our switching line of our three
core is our black our permanent line is our brown and goes in loop and our grey identified
with blue sleeving is our neutral it's just our CPC now to connect remember this doesn't
require a CPC because it's fully insulated however in the future somebody could come
along and change this for a metallic light fitting that requires a CPC and therefore
the CPC will be used then because we know the metallic light fitting would be an exposed
conductive part so pop that around there and i'm just going to dress that into position
maybe that's a little bit long i'll just trim a little bit off and it doesn't matter which
one of the two i go into in order to secure my CPC so hopefully you can see now that that
just by just putting a three core in and not doing the standard twin arrangement so we've
got our three core and CPC in position we have gained our permanent connection to line
in our loop so if we come into the ceiling rose we undo it and we want a loft light we
can just pick up our line neutral and CPC and go off and worry that the two plate or
three plate method in that area they extend the building this is a light fitting saying
a dining area and they put another extension onto the building and they want that building
to take the lighting circuit through you can come straight from the lighting point line
neutral and CPC meaning you don't need to get to the switch so at our switch here in
our previous part of the video the neutral and permanent line were there that might mean
you gotta chase down a wall to get to that point rather than the easier point which was
the light fair let's make our connections in here so we've now got this three core to
replace our twin and CPC so we've got to make our connections well let's start with the
CPC they just go together in the back of the box again fully insulated so no exposed conductive
parts so we can pop our CPC's into the earth terminal back there so they're tightened into
place so they're my CPC's in there so i've got my three core cable we know from the other
end now what we've worked out everything's going to be we said that our grey conductor
is going to be identified as our neutral so we bring our blue sleeve in and we're going
to put those together in our Wago 221 connector so pop those into there to make our connections
so that's our neutral connections and then we've got our black one which is our switching
line connection so we put our brown sleeving on there and that goes the other side of the
switch into L1 we'll connect that one up we've got a cable now we've got to find a home for
so this is the additional one this is the one we never had last time this is the extra
conductor in the three core we put this one in the other end into our loop terminal because
it's our permanent line connection sometimes on site they're calling it a permanent live
so it's a permanent line connection so where is that we know the connector block here for
the Wago 221 is our neutrals we know our CPC's are here we know our black is our switching
line so that means our permanent line connection is here in common and the two browns will
need to go together in there so i need to bring this new conductor that wasn't in the
system before the extra core becomes our permanent line and it will join this one into the common
so once i've got those connections in place we will have taken that extra feed up to the
light point that didn't have it previously so they go together in there tighten them
up and that's our three core introduced rather than the twin and CPC meaning that we've got
the three core that will carry our permanent line connection the three core that will carry
our neutral connection and our CPC as well as our switching line connections up to the
lighting point still can have a smart switch here because i've still got my neutral at
this point so in the future this can be changed for a smart switch so all my connections there
we're very comfortable with we've used a three core in CPC rather than a twin and CPC but
not to aid us here because we already had our neutral down here the three core was a
massive benefit when we come up to our ceiling rose and pendant because it's still only one
cable the effort's the same to get it to here but now if we want to extend our lighting
circuit from this point we actually have our permanent line connection our neutral and
CPC which means we can take the feed into another area hopefully this video has been
some help to you and it'd be really interesting to see as part of your training process or
a part of your apprenticeship or an electrician working on site that you've started maybe
considering putting a three core down to a switch it works both videos this one and the
previous one where i needed a neutral at the switch this time i needed a permanent line
at the ceiling rose just having a three-core between them rather than a twin and CPC is
a it's a lot handier and it obviously makes it a lot easier in the future so if you can
leave those comments below and your thoughts that would be great but as always just hope
this video has been some help
you