One of the great things about doing these videos is that I am always
learning something new. This week, I installed a light fixture and learned about grounding.
Blech...blah...I wanted this to be easier.
This story takes place at my mom's house...
So my mom bought this house about a year and a half ago.
Is that right mom? About a year and a half ago?
(off camera) "Yep!"
And it has this one light fixture up here that does not match anything else in the house and
she's really just not terribly fond of it, so it's time for it to go.
So for Christmas, instead of buying her a bottle of perfume or some other random thing,
I bought her a light fixture, which I'm going to install.
The first thing I've got to do is turn the power off. It's not always obvious which breaker goes with each
area of your house, so we're gonna have to do a little bit of trial and error
here and see what happens. Alright, let's try this one mom!
It's off? Alright, thank you! first try
First try!
I'm fairly certain pictures like this are the reason people are scared to do projects like this.
Check this out. Nice. I took the old fixture down which was
pretty simple just a couple of screws and unhooking the wires, although it was really heavy.
Anybody want to buy a light fixture?
Then I got to work installing the new fixture. There was already a ceiling plate
installed for the old fixture identical to the new one, so I didn't bother
changing them. Then I attached the wires from the fixture to those coming from
the ceiling. White to white, black to black, and grounding to grounding.
Okay, quick sidenote here: home electrical systems can vary quite a lot depending
on when your house was built and where you live, but most modern homes have
outlets - both plugs and fixtures - that have three wires: the active wire or the
hot wire, which is usually black, which supplies the power to the outlet. The
neutral wire, which is usually white, which carries the current back to the
circuit breaker box. And the grounding wire. The purpose of
the grounding wire is to provide an additional path for excess energy to be
carried back to earth - literally the ground - instead of transferring that
energy somewhere it shouldn't be, like you, and electrocuting you.
Electricity naturally looks for the shortest path back to the ground, and you don't want to
be in that path. Alright back to the story
Cover with one of these little caps. Those are to make sure that they're well insulated, they stay
connected to each other. You definitely want to use those, don't skip that part.
I had a few minor mishaps while finishing off the installation.
The screws in the ceiling plate from the old fixture were too short to reach the new
fixture, so I had to take down the ceiling plate and change them.
And there was a lot of dropping.
Doh! Dagnabbit!
but once it was secure we put in some light bulbs
and tested it out
Alright so now that we know that it works, I'm going to go ahead and put the cover on
Did you see the shock on my face?
Ugh! So what the heck happened?
Alright so basically, every time we turned on the light, it was tripping the circuit
breaker. I read the instructions again - you should always read the instructions even
if you think you know what you're doing - and this new one had a grounding screw
in it that the old one did not. The grounding wire is not attached to the
grounding screw, it wasn't like that before either I'm not sure how that
other light fixture was operational. I went back and added the grounding screw,
twisted the grounding wire around it as is indicated in the instructions, and turned
the light back on.
Okay, so now what?
Why are we tripping the power?
I got up there again , took off the shade, poked
around at it uselessly, and then put the shade back on and tried it again.
This time it worked. The only thing I did differently was not screw to shade in so far.
That shade has an extremely long screw that I was attempting to screw in
as far as it would go, but I don't think it's not meant to do that.
And this last time around, I decided not to bother screwing it in so much and for
some reason it worked. The next day I went back to research the
science behind what went wrong and now I understand why there are entire
professions built around the manipulation of electricity, because they
got real complicated, real quick.
Seriously, look up "grounded electricity" on Wikipedia and tell me if you understand it.
During my research, I learned that if the black wires and the white wires find some sort of a connection to
each other, the current is basically never going to
get to that appliance, and will be sent back to the circuit breaker box at full
force, causing it to trip.
This can occur through direct contact to the wires or through water or through
another metal object such as a nail or a screw that has been driven into the wall.
So what I think happened is that the screw holding in the shade was being
driven in a little bit too far, and interfering with the wires somehow.
Now, there's probably an electrician out there right now saying "Wait wait wait
that's not right. You didn't do it right." If so, please comment below because I
would really like to understand this issue a little bit better.
Electricity works! It's smarter than me. Thanks to all for watching, like and subscribe,
and I'll see you next time on ChickFix.
Kisses?
You've been eating cat litter, haven't you?
Gross.