New Member, New House Owner, New Light fixture

kingston73

Hello, new member here, also a new house owner and I tried and failed at my first electrical install. We have a flush mounted light fixture in the kitchen that stopped working and my wife wanted a new light anyway, so I bought a new flush mount fixture. The old fixture had 3 bulbs wired with just a white and black wire to each bulb (only 6 wires total coming out the top). It was controlled by 2 different switched in the kitchen, one by the front door and one in the hall. When it worked, either switch could turn it off when it was on. When I took it out of the ceiling, I have the following wire terminals: 4 black wires twisted into an end, 4 white wires twisted, 4 bare wires twisted, and a single red wire coming out of one of the black/white/bare wire bunches. This red wire did not seem to be attached to anything when I took the old fixture down.

I took the new fixture, attached the 2 black wires to the bunch of 4 blacks, 2 white fixture wires to the bunch of 4 whites, attached the fixture ground to the green ground screw on the new fixture mount, and when I turn on the main circuit it turns on but the switches don't turn it off. Any help would be greatly appreciated, I'm a complete moron when it comes to electricity and don't really know what I'm doing. I thought this would be fairly easy, clearly wrong.

kingston73

Well, answered my own question but would still like an explanation as to what exactly I did. Reading through some online questions and answers sites I found some people talking about a red wire and they solved their problem by connecting the red wire from the ceiling to the black wires in the fixture. Tried it and works, but I don't really understand why? I also don't understand what the bundle of 4 black wires is for since they are just connected to themselves and capped off.

brric

Power goes down to the switch. When the switch is thrown power goes through the switch, into the red wire and through the fixture.

oh'mike

Those could be any thing---might be the travelers for the 3 way switch--might just be wires going to other openings.

Before your next project buy a simple electrical tester---you can get one for $3.00 or so--

It will help you to figure out things like this.---take a picture of the box as you start work---this can come in handy when things get mixed up---Mike---