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Okay, just dumbing this down like I'm 5.
"Hire... an... electrician" :)

Seriously OP, you are "bouncing off the walls" here because you are way, way, way out of your depth.

I mean it's not monstrously hard, but it's like if someone handed you a Piper Cub airplane and said "have fun". Very docile and novice-friendly airplane. You can jab at it by trial and error and get it moving down the runway and lifted off, but in the next 4 hours you ARE going to die LOL.

You've got a smart switch and your brain said "This is a consumer product meant to be DIY'ed. Surely that MUST mean it will be super easy to install" and so you're expecting a low difficulty level.

Well, no. There are at least 2 different ways to wire a plain switch and 5 ways to wire a 3-way switch. You don't even have the vocabulary to say which one you have... and there are lots of complications you can run into.

So yeah. Flight school bruh.


I have a black wire, white wire and the bare ground wire going directly to the panel. For the smart switch my neutral wire is just the white wire?
Not necessarily. All cables are made either black-white, or black-white-red. That reflects how the cables are manufactured, it provides no indication whatsoever of the actual function of those wires. Code requires very minimal markings, but those are usually ignored, and in any case only inform people with basic skills in place. So one of those "complications" is recognizing a mis-marked switch loop.

Thanks.

I will install it exactly like this:
NO. Don't install anything "exactly" like anything. You have to identify what you have, and then see which method is applicable. No replacement for that.

I want to know where all these DIY guys get the software to draw such nice diagrams.
Most of them are copying pro diagrams made by a manufacturer. However Adobe Illustrator does a bang-up job of making an amateur drawing look semi-pro. I'm sure there are open-source alternatives.
 
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