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home electrical wiring question please?
i have a basement stairwell with one light at the bottom, switch at the top. I want to make it a 3-way switch with 2 lights. 2 sections lit from either top or bottom of stairs.
How to do? the wiring dates from 1954, but there is plenty of amperage left on the fuse formula.
Thanks ahead of time.
for barrbou,
i would NEVER trust anyone at HD or Lowes because simply because they work there, does NOT mean they know their craft. I have to remodel a bathroom because of "advice" i got from an "expert". im just as well off asking here from REAL electricians, lol
Answer:
I have many years of experience with remodeling older homes electrical systems. The problem with three ways are that there are so many different ways to do it and for a rookie, it's pretty difficult. If you have a switch at the top of the stairs and the light at the bottom, there are probably only two ways that they did it. Power comes in on a 2wire cable, called NM cable....meaning non-metallic sheathed cable. There is probably a black and a white. Then out of there, it goes downstairs on a another 2 wire cable. The black coming in is a hot and the black going down is the switch leg. The white wires are generally the neutral and they would simply tie together. Let me remind you that color alone means absolutely nothing, you will need a voltage meter to be 100% sure. The other way that they could have done it is to bring the power cable into the light and then switch loop down to the switch. That just means that they would use one 2wire cable to take power up to the switch and then back down to the light. That's where the color doesn't really matter because they would both be hot after the switch was turned on. If you have two cables in the switch box, you can do this. It's kina tricky especially if you've never done it before. It would take a professional about a half hour but after scratching your head for a little bit, you can get it done in a little more time. Here's what you do: You take the cable out of the light and put it into the switch box at the bottom of the stairs, provided that you have mounted one. Then you will run another wire up to the light from your new switch box. The new cable will have an additional ground wire in it. I'm just assuming that your existing cable does not. Here's what you need for a three way to work...a hot wire at one side, two wires from one switch bow to the next called travelers, a wire going up switching the light and a neutral for the light to work properly. That's where it's gonna get tricky. You're going to have to run another wire from somewhere, I can't see what you have going on but you need a neutral and I just know that you wont have coming from the switch at the top of the stairs. The other way to go would be to run a 3 wire cable from top of the stairs to the bottom so you can bring the neutral down with the 2 travelers. The common screw on the switch will always be the hot or the switch leg wire. As many other people on here have said, it would be safest and easiest to call a licensed sparky. It wouldn't probably be more than a hundred bucks. Here is a decent link with a nice diagram for ya. Hope all goes well
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