My wife and I bought a beautiful ceiling light - it’s a pendent light - it’s very cool, but we thought it was a plug in. When it arrived it is not a plug-in. So I suppose we have a couple options. One - we could wire it into the ceiling where the old light is, however, the wiring looks circa 1960, so I am not too confident. There is a black wire, and a white wire and an exposed copper wire [I assume that is the ground].
Or we could change the wiring and make it into a plug-in. I think. Is that possible? Can I take the cord from the ceiling mounted light and turn it into a plug-in? Do they sell those conversion kits?
Or should I just attach it to the ceiling wiring box and go from there…?
They sell replacement wire for hanging lights with the on off switch and chain all in a package. There’s no reason you can use one of these to do what you want. They’re called swag light kits. Swag Light KitSwag Light Kit
Why go to the extra hassle? Just wire the unit into the existing wires, that is how it was designed to go.
Black to black, white to white, and the bare copper to either the green wire, or secure it to the green screw on the ceiling fan.
Since you don’t sound too electrically savvy, may I suggest you either RTFM (several times) or hire a pro to do the work.
It’s easy. I can’t do much of anything around the house, but I can change switches, outlets, and lights.
First, turn on the existing light. Then flip the circuit breaker to off. Light is out? Then you’ve killed the correct circuit.
Second, I turn off the switch to the light. Hey, “extra” safety.
Then it’s read the manual, disconnect the original, attach the new wires (wire nuts make this easy). When it’s secured, flip the circuit breaker and switch. Success? If not, trip the circuit again, flip the switch, and secure connections etc.
There you go. We tried to mount it this evening and the buddy who is an electrician said - well…maybe you should buy a swag light kit because that hanging outlet is too old.
Too old? I can only guess they meant that the ceiling box is not anchored sufficiently to carry the weight of your new light.
Aside from that, 1960’s wiring shouldn’t be any different than today’s wiring - black is hot, white is neutral, green or bare is ground. Although, it is possible that the wiring from that era might be aluminum. If you have aluminum wiring, I strongly advise calling an electrician who can properly work with it.
One caution - just because you’ve turned off the switch or the breaker doesn’t mean that there might not be other, still live circuits in the wiring box. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve opened a box to find an absolute rats-nest of wires for multiple circuits.
One thing I’ve always done after the above two steps is to also test the wires by touching black to white (not touching any exposed wire with my hands) and seeing if it sparks. Is this a bad idea? After shutting the breaker and turning the switch off is there a good way to make sure it’s really dead?
If the light was on and then goes off after you turn off the breaker, it’s probably safe. The other choice is that the bulb burnt out as you were messing in the breaker box.
That said, I do test it in a probably less-than-smart way. I touch it with the back of my hand. If it is live and you touched with your fingers, the electricity may make your hand muscles grab and you can’t let go. If you touch with the back of your hand, your muscles contracting will make your muscles contract and it’ll pull you away from it.
Also - don’t trust the light switch to deactivate a wire - find the breaker. If the circuit is wired backwards, turning off the switch will kill the light but the socket will still be hot. My parents’ house is wired backwards (switches on the cold wire) and my father got shocked.
Use a voltmeter, it doesn’t have to be an expensive one. Check between both wires and then from each wire to ground. You should always check a known live circuit first to make sure the meter is working properly first.
I’m probably going to get another meter, mine is very old and I’d prefer a new one. Also I am getting the swag lamp converter tonight, I’ll post back with how it works.
I have and use a voltmeter, but I also have an inductive tester that works great. You hold the button, and it lights up if you put it near a live wire. You don’t even have to touch the wire, expose it, or anything else. Could be good for those situations where you open a junction box and find more wires than what you expected. Did the breaker kill them all, or just the one to the light? I also use it as an extra step between tripping the breaker and actually poking my hands around unscrewing/untwisting wires. I just probe it with the inductive tester before sticking my hand in there for extra peace of mind. I did have a problem once with a wire that seemed to be picking up a tiny inductive current from a parallel wire, and the tiny current was enough to cause the tester to alert. That one was perplexing for a while.
When we opened the junction box we saw black white and bare wires, the blacks (2) were ties to eachother, and the whites (2) the same, and only one ground. There was also this brown paper wrapping which looked like it was wrapped around the main wire sheath(?)
Black should be “hot”, white is “cold” or neutral (depending if the electrician followed code).
Romex is the common modern inside wire. There’s a thick plastic sheath containing a bare wire (ground) and white & black insulated wires (neutral & hot respectively). There’s often paper wrapping between the inside wires & the thick outer sheath.
If the sheath is stripped far enough back, you might not see it but they might not have removed the same length of paper.
Wiring your new light in is the same: black to black, white to white, ground to bare. Use wire nuts to make the connections and give a little tug on your thinner light wire to make sure it’s tight before you close it up.
I like to use a little plastic tape on the wire nuts to make sure they don’t back off and keep moisture out. It’s overkill to do that but I do it anyway. Makes me feel all fuzzy.