wiring a ceiling fan with light and 4 wires from ceiling

If you can positively identify the cause of the sparks and eliminate it, then you have a shot. Not being there to see what may have caused the breaker to blow or to inspect the wires, I’d agree that if you are not sure, get help. Since the fan and light work fine connected to the non-switched wire, my best guess would be that your red wire has a short at the fixture, that your initial connections were bad, or something along those lines. Now that you have already blown the breaker once, and had sparks in the fixture, all bets are off for e-mail advice.Īnd actually, the advice given would have been to wire it just the way that you originally did. No, it’s likely not all that complicated, and many folks would have probably told you how to wire it EXCEPT for the mention of the sparks. I’ll call an electrician if I have to, but it just didn’t seem like it would be all that complicated. So the red must be for the light switch, right? Why won’t it work when we connect the red but it worked with the old fan? Any ideas?Īlso, please note that I said it works fine when I connect it as if there is no wall switch, but of course I want the wall switch to work with the light but not turn off the fan as the old fan/light fixture did. When we did that, the fan and light work, but only with the pull cords. Then we rewired it as if there was no wall switch (put the black/white fan wire connected with the both the black from the fan and the ceiling and just capped the red wire). When we did that, though, and I flipped the power back on, there was a spark both on the circuit breaker and in the new ceiling fan and it didn’t work. The new fan instructions had us connect the black to black, white to white, and the black/white fan wire was supposed to connect to a “Wall Switch Wire For Separate Control of Light Fixture” (it didn’t list a color), so we connected the black/white to the red ceiling wire since that was all that was left. On the old fan, the wall switch controlled the light but the fan always worked whether the switch was on or off. In our ceiling wiring we have black, white, and red (there is no green or bare ground wire).

The new fan has a black, a white, one that is black/white, and a green (ground). The old fan that we removed had three wires, (two black one white). I installed a new ceiling fan in our room. Ok, I have a problem and know very little about electrical work.

Wiring a ceiling fan with light and 4 wires from ceiling