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The nut of the problem is the ground wire joining the neutrals in drawing 1. This is a bootlegged attempt to fix a fundamental problem of bringing 5 wires: 2 travelers, always-hot, neutral and ground in a /3+ground cable.
Everything in drawing 1 is bootlegging neutral from ground. This is bad and needs to be fixed Right Now. Not least, nothing in that ...
answered Mar 21 at 20:19
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The remote you use to turn the light on and off is not compatible with LED bulbs. One reason people love LED bulbs is because they use so little power. Unfortunately, some devices in the past used the fact that a regular light bulb can pass some current without glowing. Certain types of switches use a little bit of "parasitic" voltage running through the ...
5
It's simply a splice. They are using the screw and the backstab to accomplish what they could do with a pigtail. In particular, they are grabbing "always-hot" because this is the first switch. Presumably they are also grabbing neutral.
An ideal 3-way circuit:
What they are doing: (shown translucent)
answered Jul 9 at 17:33
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Don't downgrade to a plastic box. Metal boxes are better and what's more, they are often essential in distributing grounding to other boxes. Further in some cities (e.g. Chicago) they are required by Code.
The purpose of a box is to provide grounding and fire protection, and metal boxes do that better than plastic ones in all respects. Plastic boxes ...
answered Apr 5 at 20:16
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This can be done with wireless smart bulbs (or fixtures) and a remote switch in place of your current light switch. I'm going to describe how to do it with the Phillips Hue series, since I'm more familiar with them, but other brands will probably work just as well.
For the lights themselves, if you have not already bought the fixtures, you can get Hue ...
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That is correct. In the mains power world, we have 3 wires.
EQUIPMENT SAFETY GROUND/EARTH which is not used for anything ever (except during a fault condition, of course)...
HOT which is what humans consider the "source" of power... and
NEUTRAL which is what humans consider the "power return". Obviously, it's AC, which makes "source" vs "return" ...
answered May 20 at 0:52
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Because unlike a normal switch, the wifi switch needs power, so it needs a neutral wire to complete a circuit at the switch between the unswitched hot wire and neutral for that power.
The neutral wire to the switch cannot be a light-gauge wire (at least if you are in an area subject to NEC codes; likely similar elsewhere in the world) because codes are ...
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I think you hooked up neutral correctly. Stay away from the 3-way switch.
Your assumption that cable 2 comes from the panel may be incorrect. Mechanical switches are direction agnostic, they don't care which is supply-hot and which is switched-hot. Smart switches do. The switch needs supply hot on its (presumably) black. Then, it will power up even ...
answered Dec 4 '18 at 0:47
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The old smart switch is not capable of controlling a fan and light separately... and you never claimed it did. That means your 3 cables are
Supply (always-hot)
Onward (always-hot) power to something else
(Switched-hot) power to the fan/light
First, all grounds get nutted together with a pigtail that you'll need to buy, and get pushed into the back of the ...
answered Aug 20 at 5:51
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The garage door needs safety switches, as well as a reversing switch, a switch to detect end of travel (limit switch) and a switch to detect that correct force has been applied to keep the door closed. Simply turning the power to the whole door-opener on and off does nothing.
If you want to use the Gosund outlet to bypass the remote control terminals, you'...
3
You say that you control the lights with a “remote” and there is no smart switch. Sorry to tell you, but there must be some sort of smart switch which is receiving the signal and controlling the light. It may be part of the light fixture.
Anyway, smart switches that don’t connect to a neutral wire have to get power by trickling current through the load. ...
3
You're looking for a product that works just like industry standard, connected smart switches, but is not industry standard, not connected, and uses a proprietary radio frequency.
That wouldn't have much of a market, would it? From what you're saying, it sounds like you see the market as "it's cheaper", and you hope that incompatibility and low feature ...
answered Jun 19 at 23:40
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The 2 blacks at the bottom will be the live from the breaker and the live to the outlets. There will be another place where the wire continues to the other outlet.
The red and black are going to the fan/light. The reason for 2 wires being switched is to allow easy upgrade from single switch to a combo switch that controls the light and fan separately.
The ...
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Assuming both your switches and your GFCI have their line terminals on top and load terminals on the bottom, yes, this is correct. Double-check that that's the case on your actual devices, because while the way you show it is common, I've seen some that are the opposite as well.
Also, you should pigtail the ground to the GFCI -- it doesn't need to run ...
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You don't have neutral in that box!
Yellow/green is the one wire whose color code is is standardized worldwide: yellow/green, green or bare.c It always means safety earthing.
Anywhere you might have used those for neutral, you must correct that. Whoever taught you that is wrong, and full of shortcuts which are unsafe.
Misusing ground for neutral is ...
answered Mar 26 at 21:54
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A and B are already connected. The switch in the photo provides both backstab and screw connections which are internally connected within the switch. The builder prefers backstab connections (because they're faster; their poor reliability isn't his problem), and when he needed a second connection he used the screw also.
It looks like A is a pigtail from ...
answered Mar 18 at 14:23
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The wiring as presented makes no sense.
To start with, we can determine the upper left Romex goes to the light now controlled by the left dimmer. The upper right /3 Romex red wire provides switched-hot for that lamp, and its black wire is always-hot for onward loads. The lower left Romex is presumably supply. (it's remotely possible the /3 includes supply ...
answered Mar 15 at 14:51
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Could it be that smart light fixtures are the future and not smart switches? At least for retrofits?
I fear that my answer will lend itself to opinion, and the question you asked is definitely written so that you are asking for an opinion, but given some important facts, and assumptions you made that are at least in part mistakes; perhaps this will help:
In my house built around ~1970 all ceiling lamps are wired in a way
where neutral wire is in light ...
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Could it be that smart light fixtures are the future and not smart switches? At least for retrofits?
I'm not concerned about the neutral problem (new houses have them, old houses are gradually being upgraded, and there are some smart switches that can work without a neutral).
Easy Access
But I am very concerned about ease of access when things go wrong. And the more complex they are (microcontrollers instead of a simple switch), the more likely something ...
answered Nov 2 at 23:59
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Dollars to donuts, this is an RR7 kind of deal
In this system, you have a relay back at the service panel or control cabinet. You then run 24V low-voltage power to each switch and motion sensor.
The most common, the RR7, is a latching relay. If you send control power to the relay for 1 second, it "throws the relay over" and it stays there until it's ...
answered Apr 3 at 21:42
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Easy peasy lemon squeezy...pigtail your neutral from the bundle to the other switch.
2
It is not possible to give you an answer to your question that covers the exact details because there are a range of different technologies in use for smart devices. I will list a few of them here:
1) Some smart devices use proprietary wireless RF connections to a hub device that then in turn connects to your network. The hub knows how to search for devices ...
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Always use logic to solve electrical problems. Uninformed trial and error will lead you to many combinations which will "work" but create a lethal condition, either immediately or by breaking the redundancy that keeps electrical safe, so a trivial/routine failure elsewhere that shouldn't create a hazard, now does. The fact that you are connecting a switch ...
answered Sep 7 at 19:28
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Connect eight #14's by connecting a ground pigtail with four #14’s, then, the other end of the pigtail joins the other four #14’s.
answered Oct 22 at 23:47
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Could it be that smart light fixtures are the future and not smart switches? At least for retrofits?
Lights aren't just for you
Doing this is fine for auxiliary lighting. But there must be a primary light in the room that normal humans can operate without installing an "app". That's right in the building codes, and your occupancy permit will not be issued (or be revoked) if you don't have this. I can only think of 3 ways to operate the primary light:
...
answered Nov 3 at 15:33
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As you have now learned the hard way, always take a picture BEFORE disconnecting any wires. That way (a) you can put things back to the original configuration if necessary and (b) the original configuration can help others trying to figure out what is going on. That being said, the simple setup would be:
One set of wires = power in from panel. Presumably ...
answered Aug 20 at 4:38
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This is perfectly normal.
This is a switch loop coming into switch 3.
Ordinarily you would have a plain switch attached to the /2 cable's black and white (white should be marked with tape, since it is being used as either an always-hot or a switched-hot, you're supposed to use it for always-hot).
A 3-way or 3/4-way complex simply substitutes for a ...
answered Aug 14 at 20:24
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You have the right idea
You understand that a wire going into a backstab right next to the screw is the same as going to the screw. And you understand that when a wire goes to the backstab, and another goes to the screw right next to it, those wires are also connected to each other.
Let's pause, to remove confusion, and take that load/switched wire ...
answered Jul 6 at 21:02
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Finally I figured how your smartphone passes your wifi info to the smart switch. My guess was right, it was using ultrasonic communication behind the scenes. And this seems to be somewhat common with devices such as Chromecast, Lisnr & Chirp.
I tested this with an ultrasonic wave capturing app and all fell into place afterwards.
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Here is my guess what is going on:
Old Wiring
Not super old like my house. (OK, that's not "super old", just the 1950s. Super old is knob & tube). Just old enough to not have required a neutral in the switch box. Neutrals in the switch box are trivial if the wiring is panel->switch->fixture. But they require an extra wire - and builders don't like to ...
answered May 26 at 5:08
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