In the late 1800's, the town of Monument Beach, Massachusetts, was the summer home to President Grover Cleveland. On Sunday mornings, he could be found in a chapel just a short walk from the Cape Cod Canal. This historical chapel is now home to the McClung family where Ron was asked to help install a new light fixture.
Click Here For a list of what
you will need in order to complete this project.
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1. Set Up:
- Ron and Pam started by moving all the furniture that was in the way of the fixture. For any project involving electrical work, you will always want to use a fiberglass or a wooden ladder. Do not use metal ladders when working with electricity.
- Make sure that the power is off before you start working. Throwing the switch is not enough. The light will go out, but it is still possible to have electricity running through the wires. You will need to go to your circuit breaker or your fuse box and turn the power off there.
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2. Disassemble old fixture:
- Start by taking the globe off. There are usually some finger nuts around the rim.
- After you have removed the light bulb, use an electricity tester in the socket to make sure that there is no live electrical current. If power is present, the tester will buzz.
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- Many fixtures are mounted differently. To remove this one, Pam had to grab the tube with her left hand while reaching up with her right hand to a little ring at the top of the shaft. By unscrewing this, the cone dropped down exposing the wiring for the old fixture.
- Once again, Ron recommends that you take the tester and touch all the wires confirming that there is no current.
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3. Disconnect old fixture:
- Most light fixtures are connected with two wires. Start by disconnecting the wire nuts, which are the little plastic caps connecting the fixture wires with the home electrical wires.
- The wires will be twisted together. Untwist them and then just pull the two wires apart.
- This particular fixture was held up with a threaded rod, which was unscrewed, and the old fixture came down.
- Temporarily place the wire nuts back on the ends of the wires and remove the old mounting strap (or bracket)that is usually held in place by two or three screws.
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4. Connect New Fixture
- Replace the old mounting strap with the one that usually comes packaged with the new fixture. Attach a new copper ground wire to the new mounting bracket
- In this fixture, Ron threaded the new wires through the trim plate and then also through a threaded nipple. Then he took the ends of the wires and pushed them through the hole in the mounting strap.
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- Then Ron screwed the threaded nipple into the hole in the center of the mounting bracket.
- Connect the electrical supply wires on the new fixture to the wires coming from the ceiling box by twisting them together and then screwing on insulated wire nuts. Wire nuts come in different sizes, indicated by their color. The orange size is what Ron used for this job. Green wire nuts are used for ground wires.
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5. Assemble new fixture:
- Pam secures the trim plate to the ceiling using a decorative screw eye that attaches to the threaded nipple in the mounting strap. Then, she hooks an open chain link into the eye, attaches the rest of the chain to the open link, and … there you have it, the new fixture is up.
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THE RESULTS:
Pam McClung is quite a do-it-yourselfer, and has renovated and restored her historic home from top to bottom. But electricity is one thing she has always been wary of. With Ron's help, Pam realized that even simple electrical jobs can be safe and easy to do. She now has a beautiful new lighting fixture in her dining room that took less than a day to install, and she did most of the steps herself! |
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