CurtPalme.com Home Theater Forum

[JustGreg]

I have a question for the electricians here concerning dimmers for can lights.

When I was building my basement HT a friend of mine who works in industrial maintenance performed all the wiring in the room.

He ran 2 feeds to the room to power 6 outlets and 4 zone lighthing. Does that sound right? The outlet wiring I get. It's the dimmers that I question...
I was moving the wires for one of the can lights the other day and had the dimmer all the way off but I STILL got zapped! I know...I should have killed the power at the breaker but I've done this a million times over the years without getting zapped.
The VOM read ~84 volts with the thing off yet the bulb wasn't lit even dimmly...how is that possible?

I wasn't overly thrilled with the wiring going into switch gang in the first place but he assured me it was to code. It looked like something out of a sci-fi movie. I pulled the faceplate off the 4 gang box after getting zapped and it's a total mish mash in there.

Anywho, if there are any electricians in here could you explain how one feed should be wired to power 4 dimmer switches? It's 20 amp with 12 AWG and like I said they are just can lights so that should be more than adequate.

Thanks!

Greg

[Curt Palme]

It's all in the load. Cheapie light dimmers, even expensive ones usually use TRIAC semiconductors to do the dimming. A light bulb is a very low resistance load, so when the TRIAC is off, the slight leakage won't cause the light bulb to light up.

Your skin is much more sensitive to 110 volt leakage than a bulb, so you felt the slight leakage of the TRIAC most likely. Me, I'd have to wet my fingers to feel that..

And yeah, the quality of electrical wiring has gone to hell along with everything else. Cram the wiring into the box and it's probably to code. Inspectors are much more concerned with proper grounding than wiring dressing and etiquette.

I commented on the sloppy wiring job of a friend's monster home that he was building a few years ago, and he told me later that the city inspector commented on how neat the wiring was.

Gruesome!

[Curt Palme]

It's all in the load. Cheapie light dimmers, even expensive ones usually use TRIAC semiconductors to do the dimming. A light bulb is a very low resistance load, so when the TRIAC is off, the slight leakage won't cause the light bulb to light up.

Your skin is much more sensitive to 110 volt leakage than a bulb, so you felt the slight leakage of the TRIAC most likely. Me, I'd have to wet my fingers to feel that..

And yeah, the quality of electrical wiring has gone to hell along with everything else. Cram the wiring into the box and it's probably to code. Inspectors are much more concerned with proper grounding than wiring dressing and etiquette.

I commented on the sloppy wiring job of a friend's monster home that he was building a few years ago, and he told me later that the city inspector commented on how neat the wiring was.

Gruesome!

[JustGreg]

Yeah my buddy was pretty proud of himself that it all worked but twas I who installed the new breakers and I who ran the 2 new feeds all the way across the basement nice and neat... and not twisted... and all stapled nice and neat....holy hell, I've become Rain Man! " Yeah...I'm a good wirer. Dad lets me wire on Sunday. Yeah."

OK...but dimmers just break the hot (black) right? And the white wire (neutral) continues on to the light fixture...Yes? No?
I'll have to take a pix of the mess (IMO) in this box and post it. Seems to me he could have done alot of what he did IN the box OUTSIDE the box in a separate gang...but what do I know.

Greg

[Mark_A_W]

You guys use Black for the Active wire?????

Black and Red used to be used here 20+ years ago...but black was neutral.

Now we use the international standard - Brown = Active, Blue = Neutral, Green with Yellow stripes = ground.


I thought everyone was using the same international standard colours now?

[drice1234]

Yea, we will starting using that wiring standard right after we switch to the metric system and start calling soccer football

[drice1234]

Greg,
Depending on the style of dimmer you have you can either run a seperate wire from your hot (black) to each dimmer which means you will have 5 wires wire nutted(sp) together or if your dimmer switch allows for it you can run your hot into the first switch and then there will either be a screw terminal or a hole that you can push the stripped wire into that will allow you to extend the hot to the next dimmer and so on. All neutrals should be tied together in the box and all grounds should be tied together.

[AnalogRocks]

[AnalogRocks]