[liquidvw]

So my project, as per the wife, was to add 2 ceiling fans to the kids rooms. 1 in each. First one went really well but I ran into some trouble with the second. All wire is 14/2 and I didn't draw the grounds in the picture. Yellow is the white neutral wire.

The first picture is what the wiring looked like before in both rooms. There is power feeding the box where the outlet is then a wire that connects to the switch and back to the outlet. That's where I took power for the fan after it comes from the switch. This way the fan goes on and off with the switch.

So on the 2nd room with the same setup, I noticed that gang box was smaller and that putting in another wire would overfill the box. I decided to remove the box and install a deep one. Shouldn't be too hard as the old box was the old work type so it came right out. The problem was installing the new box. One of the wires had the insulation stripped back really short and there was no slack. So when I put that wire in the new box, the insulation was stripped back so it was outside of the box. I wasn't happy with this and I didn't want to re run that wire. Here is what I did.


Behind the outlet was a closet. I cut in a new box inside same studs but higher up and pulled all the wire to there. Then I put in a 1 foot section to feed the existing outlet that now had no wires. Then I connected the fan there.

Now my question. Is this done correctly?

 

[ScottR]

A lot of people would have left that unsheathed wire outside of the box, pigtailed it for extra length, and called it a day.

Putting the extra jbox in the closet where it's accessible was 100% the right way to do it. :thumbup:

Looks like your wiring diagram is OK too. Good deal.

(I would have tapped the line for the fan at the jbox in the closet to cut down on connections, but that's just IMO).

 

[ScottR]

Just realized that one thing didn't make 100% sense to me:

Is the switched receptacle for all the lighting in the room? I only ask b/c at night if you wanted the fan on, the light would have to be turned off using its attached switch. You'd have to turn the fan off manually for lights+no fan.

 

[liquidvw]

Thanks for the reply.


The switch is for the fan which has a light and the outlet. The fan has a remote so I can use that to control the light and fan. There is no other lights in the room other then whats on the fan.

 

[ScottR]

Ah hah! You seemed to know what you were doing, so I knew I was probably just missing something. Makes complete sense now..

 

[liquidvw]

Thank you ScottR

 

[adpanko]

What you did definitely works and doesn't appear to be any code violations. One suggestion though; assuming it was possible, you should have taken the outlet off of the switch so there would always be power flowing to it. Without any overhead lights, you were required to have an outlet on a switch. But now that you have an overhead box on the switch, the outlet isn't required to be on a switch anymore.

I may be reading your diagram incorrectly, but it appears that the box that the outlet is in has the live wire coming into it, then pigtailed such that one line goes off to the switch (which comes back to the outlet) and one goes off to other outlets in the house. If this is the case, you should have added another run off the pigtail so that the outlet in the box was being fed directly by the live wire, and no longer off the switch.

I know you said you had box size issues, but since you ended up adding a box and doing a workaround, you probably could easily take that outlet off of the switch now. But again, it isn't any violation, just an inconvenience (in my opinion) now to have that outlet on a switch when it doesn't have to be. But very good job though; appears to be no code violations.

 

[liquidvw]

Thanks adpanko. You are correct with what you said that power comes to the box then to the switch and back to the box. I could have done what you said, but since I'm not an electrician, I didn't want to change things too much. To be honest I wasn't 100% sure that what I did was right when I did it. Thankfully it looks like it is.