OT: Ceiling lamp install

[Bill]

I installed my first ceiling lamp today. It works, and my wife is happy, but when I look at it critically, I can see it's not 100% level from every angle. Slightly loosening one of the two ball nuts helped quite a bit, and that got me thinking that there should probably be be a shim to compensate. But the edge of the "canopy", which is against the ceiling, is only "sheet metal thin". The color of the canopy is that of "aged brass" (there is link to the retailer's photo below) and the color of the ceiling is some version of white, so I can't just stick a colored toothpick under the edge ...maybe I should stain some toothpicks? :)

The junction box and ceiling are "as I found them". The ceiling surface is that "fake" stucco--rather old at that. And surely the ceiling is not uniformly planar throughout. And I think I would point to that as a possible source of my leveling problem. I believe that the new ring I attached to the junction box (in place of the bar for the old lamp which was there) lies slightly higher than the surface of the ceiling. The retailer describes the lamp as "semi-flush mount" (which may have implications--I can only guess at what that means).

Folks here have been very helpful and kind with regard to helping me with "homeowner hurdles" like this. Does anyone have any comments or suggestions for this? Shimming techniques? Now that I've got it wired up with the shade adjusted and all, it wouldn't be that difficult to make small adjustments (as long as I don't have to do it today! --I've looked at it enough today! : ) )

Thank you! Bill

In case it may help, here is the retailers photo of the lamp:

[Leon]

Electrical fixtures are NEVER flat, round, or square.

If you have to stare at it to notice it, don't look at it for a month and see if it still bothers you then.

[russellseaton1]

Do you have access to the electrical box itself? Meaning is it accessible in the attic and you can unscrew it from the ceiling rafter and move the box up a tiny bit so it is flush or slightly recessed from the ceiling drywall. Or is it a two story house and the light box is in the ceiling of the ground floor and you have no access to the screws holding the box to the joists. So the box is fixed in place, unmovable. I'm probably going to go along with Leon on this and say ignore it and forget about it. Its not really noticeable. And if you think it is noticeable, remember it is a ceiling light. Up high about 8 feet. Most people's eyes are about 5-5.5 feet high. And they generally look straight ahead or down. So no one else will see it. You just flip the light switch and the light appears. You don't look at the light source and examine it in great detail. Light, no light.

[knuttle]

I agree, It is like painting. When YOU look at it critically you will find all types of small imperfections.

However no one but you will ever notice it unless YOU point it out.

[Bill]

As far as the attic, the single story house has a "convoluted" roof, and I have never seen a direct way to get to that part of the attic. It would be within 4 feel of where eave troughs meet at a corner. My neighbor, who bought his house within 2 weeks of when I bought mine, fell through his ceiling within the first week, landing on his kitchen table. I tread lightly. : )

There seems to be a consensus the I should wait 30 days and see how I feel about it, and I am quite willing to try that. The only thing that may make this "imperfection" slightly more noticeable than average is that the lamp is fairly large (it is 18" wide and it hangs 18" from the ceiling). Sometime my desire for perfection is a hindrance, and this may be one of those times. The house is over 50 years old and this wouldn't be its first or only imperfection.

By the way, going back to my first paragraph above, to my surprise, the junction box also contains wiring which pigtails to the outlets in an adjacent room (it helps confirm a history of the house that I suspected but won't go into here). When I mentioned it to my wife, she confirmed it by saying "That's how the neighbor's house is!". But the point I wanted to make is that I don't want to "open the door" to rehashing any the complexity of what lies in that junction box. If I needed to do it, I could remove some of the ceiling and really open the door to a real project. Despite the nice things I said in an earlier thread about drywalling, thank you, but no! ; ) I should count my blessings that I have a new lamp that works, and that I have acquired the expertise to install it, such as it is. The previous installer just wrapped the stranded ground wire around the pig-tailed ground a few times, I did so and added a wire nut! : )

To try to contribute something back to the group, I will share a tip I saw used only once a long time ago and I found it very helpful today. I used twine to suspend my lamp to within a few inches of the junction box. That turned out to be very convenient for wiring and it reduced the stressing on my wire connections while iterating through my adhoc leveling process.

Thank you all Very Much for your support! : )

Bill

[Leon]

The twine to hang the weight while tying loose ends is a good idea.

For some reason I have never thought to do that, it would be nice for ceiling fans.

What color twine? ;!)

[Clare Snyder]

The outlets in the other room connected to the lighting circuit in that room is "common practice" in houses of that age with a "drop leg" switch setup for the light. The lamp is not powered through the switch

- the neutral (generally) for the lampis "dropped" to / through the switch - meaning the socket is always "live". sometimes it is the "live" that is dropped to the switch - where it MAY end up feeding another outlet (or lamp circuit)

[Clare Snyder]

My dad, an electrician, used to have a "fixture hanging hook" that would suspend the fixture from the bar while he made the connections - basically his "third hand" or "electrician's helper" that didn't draw a wage --

[DerbyDad03]

The last ceiling fan that I hung (Kirchner) was designed to hang by itself while you wired it. It used a "ball and socket" design as shown below.

Very easy install and I think the ball helps "auto balance" the fan. All I know is that it has absolutely no wobble.

[russellseaton1]

Oh YES. I have made many drywall fixes and repaints of the patch. And nail hole fixes painted over, after filling with drywall. And some of my paint is not original. I had to have it matched at the store. Home Depot. They DO NOT do a perfect match of paint. So I have lots of mismatches all over the house. Every time I walk into a room, my eyes instantly go to the mismatched paint spots and less than perfect (HA) drywall patches. And I curse inside. But probably no one else notices them.

[Bill]

Yes, the neutral was "pig-tailed". At the time, I thought turning off the breaker and turning off the switch was making me "double safe" but at this point it sounds that the positive would have been hot if I had only turned off the switch (something I would never do, but I know of others who take shortcuts like that). Thank you very much Clare for familiarizing me with what was really going on there! You say it was "common practice in that age". Do they not typically do that anymore?

[Bill]

By the way, two 100W (13.5W) bulbs really lights up the place, and the shaded globe provides a new ambiance dimming at low levels.

My wife asked me why the cracked tile in front the refrigerator doesn't bother me so much! ; ) It's on "my list"... Maybe it will be a good wintertime project? Due to "shifting" I think, there is more than one that needs replacement. I already "did my homework" and detailed the materials required and the process, probably 2 years ago...maybe

2022 will be the year--if I can locate the sheet of paper on which I wrote it all down! : )

[Clare Snyder]

I believe there is a movement in code regulators to discourage or prohibit "neutral drops". Running outlets off of lighting circuits would then HAVE to occur in the switch box instead of the ceiling box. The neutral drop switching saved a LOT of wire - and "live drop" switching was capable of saving even more. (particularly in slab bungalows where all the wiring could be run in the attic, with power from the "switch drop" fed over to wall outlets. Since "hidden junction boxes"are illegal, and junction boxes in the attic are generally considered "hidden" - making all the junctions in lamp boxes and switch boxes "simplified" things by reducung the number of "home runs" required.

[krw]

I've never had any success matching paint either. When I paint, I keep the remainder of the paint then use that for patching. It works really well. Failing that, I paint the entire wall. The lighting is different enough that you'll never notice the change in a corner or from wall to wall.

[krw]

The Fanimation fans I've installed are similar. You're lucky. The ball doesn't help a but. The fan still needs to be balanced. It's not really that hard to do if hung from a horizontal ceiling. Not sure how it to do it with a sloped ceiling.

[krw]

I hope you kept the original tiles.

I'm going to tile the two bathrooms (maybe replace the master, too) and laundry. I'm tempted to run the tile all the way through the kitchen too. I need to replace all of the "wood" floors and I really don't like wood in the kitchen. We'll probably do bamboo but same deal.

[Markem618]

Sloped ceilings require a different mount for the ball to fit in.

[G Ross]

If I remember from shop in high school, the code stated "the neutral shall not be broken by a switch or fuse". That was over 60 years ago, so maybe I am wrong, or that the code was broken at will by some builders.

[krw]

Depends on the slope but that doesn't help balancing the blades. The problem is the same.

I suppose with a sloped ceiling one could just measure in one place and turn the blade to find the high one.

[Markem618]

I weighed the hardware balanced the blades that way added a gram of weight to one of the five, the ceiling is a 4/12 pitch. It is a bit anal but the fan was balanced from the start.