Ceiling Fan Help

[Jerry Cruz]

I recently replaced a ceiling fan in our bedroom. I also bought one of those fan/light wall controlers (both fan & wall control are made by Harbor Breeze and purchased from Lowes).

I first installed the fan by itself and everything worked fine.

I then went back in and installed the receiver for the fan/light wall control. No problem there. The problem I have is with the replacing the switch with the fan/light control. When I went to take out the switch it had way too many wires. The control plate has 3 wires (green, white & black). The switch has two black wires screwed down to the switch, a green wire and then a black & red wire that are both attached to the switch and it appears they cannot be removed without sniping them off.

I'm totally lost as how to install this control plate. Can anyone help me? Thanks in advance.

Jerry

[jim]

the old wall switch had two black wires?? right tben thats the power ON/OFF for the old switch to operate... the green wire is just a ground wire.. on the new switch you take the green wire and put it onto ground if it has on in the wall.. if not then attach it to the box in the wall on the side(anyplace where it is not attached to a wire(unless you have a bare copper wire which is ground it there.. and take the other two wires on the switch and black and red.. just put them to the two black wires and it should work... cut the wires and use wire nuts(plastic things that attache the wires togethere and you should not have any trouble).. hope this helps.

[I-zheet M'drurz]

The control plate is no problem, but I can't figure out all of those wires attached to your existing switch. Are you saying that there are 4 or 5 wires attached to the switch??? (2 black, a green, and a "black & red" which might be one wire or two, it's hard to tell from the way you wrote it) OK, it it's only 4 wires (B, B, G, RB) that would likely indicate a 3-way switch, but you haven't mentioned that possibility. ???

OK, sorry I teased you on the "control plate": Forget anything in your mind about that being a *switch*, it's not. It's actually a mini transmitter, it itself doesn't interrupt the flow of current to the fan like a switch would, it sits there and emits a signal based on what is going on at the external "switch". Sooooo...you just supply power to it, just like if you were wiring a light fixture or duplex plug, you attach B, W & G to it, and it will function. *BUT*...you also need to "feed through" the B, W & G to the fan/light/receiver. So you're going to need to untwist the white wires, add yours to the bundle, then replace the wirenut. Same goes for Ground, you must somehow tie your green pigtail into the existing ground wiring. The mini-mystery here is all those damned wires going to your switch. You're going to use a couple of them, but from what you've said so far, I can't tell you which ones. HTH, at least a little bit.