black dining room light
one of the great things about doingthese videos is that i am always learning something new. this week, iinstalled 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 ofit, 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 haveto 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 screwsand 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 identicalto the new one, so i didn't bother changing them. then i attached the wiresfrom the fixture to those coming from the ceiling. white to white, black toblack, and grounding to grounding. okay, quick sidenote here: home electricalsystems can vary quite a lot depending on when your house was built and whereyou live, but most modern homes have outlets - both plugs and fixtures - thathave three wires: the active wire or the
hot wire, which is usually black, whichsupplies 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 anadditional path for excess energy to be carried back to earth - literally theground - instead of transferring that energy somewhere it shouldn't be, likeyou, 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 thestory 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 whilefinishing 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 theceiling 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 itworks, i'm going to go ahead and put the cover on
did you see the shock on myface? ugh! so what the heck happened? alright so basically, every time we turnedon the light, it was tripping the circuit breaker. i read the instructions again - youshould 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. thegrounding wire is not attached to the grounding screw, it wasn't like thatbefore either i'm not sure how that other light fixture was operational. iwent back and added the grounding screw, twisted the grounding wire around it asis 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 putthe shade back on and tried it again. this time it worked. the only thing i diddifferently was not screw to shade in so far. that shade has an extremely longscrew that i was attempting to screw in as far as it would go, but i don't thinkit's not meant to do that. and this last time around, i decided notto 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 themanipulation 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 sentback 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 ascrew that has been driven into the wall. so what i think happened is that thescrew holding in the shade was being driven in a little bit too far, andinterfering with the wires somehow. now, there's probably an electrician outthere 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 thisissue 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.