Replacing an overhead light fixture | Return to blog

Disclaimer

I am describing herein the replacement of a light fixture. If you choose to follow just these directions, you do so at your own risk. I assume no liability for any untoward consequences. Better you should get yourself some books like I did, and study the situation yourself, or, you could always call an electrican.

The situation to be remedied

In the rec room we are renovating, the previous owners started to make a bar by converting a closet. They built a double-door cabinet in the bottom half of the converted closet, and tiled around the shelf topping the cabinet. They installed a track lighting fixture at the top of the alcove, no doubt intending to spotlight items in the alcove. The bar was to be wet, but was never connected. You can see the top half of the alcove to the left.

We have no need of a bar. When the decorator was here to help us select drapery material, she suggested that we use the alcove for our high definition TV, and we immediately agreed with this suggestion. However, that made the track lighting no longer necessary. We decided to replace it with a single bulb fixture with a globe. The last time I had an electrician in to replace a flourescent fixture in the laundry room, he took twenty minutes to install a fixture I had bought and charged $180. That was several years ago. Stephen has a whole shelf of books on home repair/home building. I decided to read up on this issue. Perhaps we could save ourselves a couple of hundred bucks. My only concerns were 1) was the work simple and direct enough for me to do it and 2) could I do it safely.

First Steps

As it turned out, at least three of Stephen's do-it-yourself books contained fairly specific information on how to change a light fixture, and two of the books contained detailed descriptions, directions and pictures. I settled on The Family Handyman: Helpful Hints, one of the many do-it-yourself books produced by Reader's Digest and published in 1995. The ISBN# is 0-89577-617-0, in case you want to get an inexpensive used copy at Amazon. When I looked, you could get a used copy for one penny plus shipping. The picture to the right shows the detailed page in the book. As I read the information, I saw that the process seemed very doable, even by a novice like me.

I decided to remove the cover for the existing light, just to evaluate whether things looked as the book showed. Also, in one of those weird coincidences that are fortunate, as I was removing the old wallpaper in this alcove, one of the halogen lights in the old fixture (the last working one) blew out, and I had to go to the switchbox in the basement to get the lights in the room to come back on. So I knew where the switch for this circuit was. The Family Handyman advice was adamant that the circuit be turned off at the switchbox while doing repairs.

You can see in the right-most picture the situation I found. Things to note are as follows 1) There are two wires coming out of the ceiling box. The black wire on the right is the "live" wire, and the white wire on the left is the "neutral" wire. 2) Below you can see that each of the three lights has a black and a white wire coming up from it. The three white wires from the fixture have been twisted together with the white wire from the ceiling box, and the three black wires from the fixture have been twisted together with the black wire from the ceiling box. Then black electrician's tape has been placed over these two splices. So the situation was clear. To remove the old fixture, I simply had to unwrap the tape over the splices and disconnect the fixture wires.

But wait a minute, there were a couple of other changes that had to be made. 3) Right at the ceiling box, you can see a strip of shiny metal sitting crosswise to the box. This is called the fixture's mounting strap. It comes with the fixture. The way it works is the mounting strap is attached to the ceiling box, and then the fixture is attached to the mounting strap. So, I also had to remove the old mounting strap from the ceiling box. 4) And finally, there was the ground wire. That is a bare wire coming out of the ceiling box that gets attached to the mounting strap of the fixture. That had to be disconnected too.

Disconnecting the old light fixture

It always seems that it's easier to take things apart then to put them back together, and this was the case here. I had the tape off and the wires disconnected in a matter of minutes. The wire coming out of the ceiling was quite stiff, and I was glad that Stephen had a couple of electrician's snub-nosed pliers with insulated handles to bend them into shape. Removing the old mounting strap was just a matter of unscrewing the securing screws.

Putting up the new light fixture

This was definitely the most challenging part of the job. The picture to the left shows the ceiling box with the new mounting strap screwed in place. However, there were problems. For one thing, one of the mounting screws that came with the new fixture failed to have threads on it. I finally solved the problem by noticing that I could use the mounting screws from the old fixture to secure the new fixture. Another problem was that the ground wire had been wrapped around a screw in the ceiling box. I finally decided to leave it that way, since the new mounting bracket was placed directly on the metal ceiling box. I humbly add, though, that it's decisions like these that could possibly lead to problems for an inexperienced person. Alternatively, I could have detatched the ground wire from the ceiling box screw and attached it to the green ground screw on the new mounting bracket.

A TRULY challenging part of this replacement was attaching the base of the new mounting fixture to the mounting bracket newly placed on the ceiling box. The problems will not be described in detail. Suffice it to say that two long screws have to be threaded through holes in the base and then screwed into holes on the mounting strap. Sounds simple, but believe me, I was breathing hard when this was finished. Having to crouch over in the top half of an alcove to see what I was doing was part of the difficutly. There was also insulating material that had to be placed right, and the wires had to fit into a smaller space between the base and the ceiling. But, if a 70 year old duffer like me can do it, most of you can probably do it too.

The last step was to screw in the light bulb, flip the breaker switch back on at the connection box, and test the light. It worked. Then the glass globe had to be fitted over the bulb and attached to the base by tightening three small screws. You've probably done this before when you replaced a bulb in a ceiling lamp. The picture to the right shows the finished job. The whole process took about an hour, but with experience, it should be a 15 minute job. And think of the money you save.

One disappointing postscript is this. The old track lighting fixture was on a rheostat switch. When I turned it on, the rheostat was not working, just a simple on/off. I'm not sure what the problem is. This is not the first time a rheostat has gone out on me. Maybe when the light blew before it happened, I don't know. But guess what my next project is? Heh. Replacing a rheostat! By the way, total cost of this project, not counting my time, was about $10 for the new light fixture, bought at Home Depot.