Hi! I am Mark Donovan from homeadditionplus.com and today, I am going to show how to wire a single pole light switch.
One word of caution before working on any type of electrical circuit in your house, make sure you turn power off the circuit panel first and then check it at the switch or the outlet before actually beginning any work on the circuit.
In regards to the wire that I used on this project, I used 14-2, which means it has two insulated wires. A black one, which is the hot, and a white one, which is the return and then a bare copper wire, which is used for ground. Typically, in a switch circuit like this, you are going to use something like 14-2 or 12-2.
So, what I first did was I brought in power for the main circuit panel using 14-2 Romex wire. I then added a section of 14-2 Romex wire from the switch box to the light bulb fixture. So as you can see here, we brought wire in from the main circuit panel into the switchbox and we took the black wire coming from the main circuit panel and attach it to one end of the single pole switch. The other black wire attaches to the other Romex wire that goes up to the light fixture itself. You will also notice that we attach the ground. We tied the two grounds together for each bundle of wire. Wrap them together nice and tight and then attach them to the green lug knot on the side of the switch. And then finally, we took the returns, associate with the main panel supply and the white return coming back from the light fixture and tie them together with a wire knot.
At the light fixture itself, we took the Romex wire and again attached the black wire to one contact point on the light fixture and the white wire to the other side of the contact fixture. The ground wire, normally we connect to the chassis or the metal surface of the light fixture or there maybe a braided wire that hangs off the light fixture itself that you wrap around this bare copper wire. So with the switch connected back into the switchbox, the light bulb now plugged into the light fixture outlet, you can see that we have the circuit operational again.
So that is it. Very simple to wire a single pole light switch. If you have any other home improvement questions, visit us at homeadditionplus.com today.
