Hi fellow Hiveians,
Today I wanted to appreciate a little DIY fun I had the other day swapping out a broken light switch!
There is a lot of things to be gained by engaging in some good old fashioned DIY work. This day was no different!
A few weeks ago, I was in the living room doing my normal nighttime routine of cleaning things up. I do this almost every night because it's just part of my household tasks for the day - the little man makes a mess and picks up SOME of it, but I take care of the rest of it later on. It's a little annoying sometimes but I'm used to it now and don't particularly mind it. He gets to enjoy his toy time more and does know that it's important we pick things up, but in the evening before bed he gets a little bit of a pass.
I turned the light on when I was doing it and didn't think anything of it but I was walking around and I smelled this terrible burning plastic smell. I knew that wasn't right, as the stove or oven wasn't on. The heat wasn't on, but I couldn't locate the damn smell! That drove me nuts for a few days but then one I day I was determined to find the damn culprit.
I went downstairs for my normal stuff again and didn't realize what I had done before the smell started. I was scouring the whole damn area LOL the dishwasher was on, so I checked that but nope, not there. Nothing was on for the oven or stove so that was ok. The fridge..? Is that the smell?! Nope.. that smells pretty normal. I went to turn off the lightswitch to the kitchen and I happened to hear a faint fuzzy sound coming from the light switch.. and I was curious.
I got closer and took a whiff, and sure enough! The fucking smell was coming from the light switch! I was glad I found the fucker, but I was also frustrated because I don't love doing things of the electrical nature.. but knew that I would have to take care of it otherwise that would be an expensive bill, as well as just being dangerous. It will eventually catch fire!
I am lucky that I already had purchased the exact same switch a year or two ago in hopes of installing a fan in the bedroom. It made sense to just match the switch to the one we had downstairs, as I liked being able to turn the light as well as the fan on at once instead of both of them going on. That made it easier as well because I wouldn't have to go find one from the store.
I wanted to have my son help me do the job here.. but with this type of electrical stuff I am pretty nervous and don't want him near it, especially because my wife wouldn't appreciate it since it is a little too mature of an activity for him just yet. One day, yes but not yet.
So I took advantage of the time I had when they weren't home and got to work! It was funny because I randomly chose a time 20 minutes before I had a fairly important meeting to attend to. I was committed though, so I said fuck it let's go! I got the new light switch, and went to work.
First thing is you obviously have to remove the plate cover. That exposes the raw switches and gives you a chance to get to the wiring itself. I took the plate off and then unscrewed the switch to get it to come out so I could get a look at it. A good idea when you are doing this type of thing, when it is hanging out like that, you should give it a test as well to see if you can visually see where the issue is. It also is helpful to confirm again what is happening so I turned the light on and heard the fuzzy, crackling sound and knew that this thing was indeed toast.
Next step is one that I thought of after I got my tools ready, but it makes sense! I went to the electrical panel and found the light switch breaker and turned that thing OFF. It could have been possible for me to do it with live electricity but that's just a silly thing to do if you have easy access to the panel and can just turn it off. So off it went! That made my stress level a LOT lower and helped speed the job up quite a bit.
The biggest takeaway for me with this job is to do it methodical! You need to make sure to do it one step at a time. I took a few photos of course so that I could document it later but also remember what the hell I did in case something came up and I needed to refer back to it.
I took off one wire from the old and found the corresponding wire on the new. For example, I unscrewed the red wire first. I then connected that same red wire on the new switch to the wire that the old one was connected to. I then did the black, yellow and green step by step. This was the best idea for me to do it because in the end, I didn't have to freak out thinking I messed something up. They all matched up!
I turned the electrical breaker back on and tested it, and thankfully things were good! I made sure to smell it and it indeed smelled okay, as well it also didn't have any weird fuzzy or popping sounds that the other one did so that was good.
The way these dimmer and variable speed things work is they use what's called a rheostat - basically a throttle. If you turn it on at the low end of the electricity, it sends a small amount of electricity down the connection to the fan or light to turn on. If you turn the light all the way on, it sends unrestricted electricity down to the unit. Because of this variability, they wear out a lot faster than a normal switch would, which makes sense.
So at the end of the day, I saved us from a fire, got some more confidence in my DIY skills, and got to have fun writing a post for Hive. Win, win and win! :D
What about you, do you like to fix things around the house like this? Let me know in the comments!
-CmplXty. Real human written content, never AI. All pictures are mine unless otherwise stated
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