Wire that Light Switch, Dummies!

Wiring an end of run light switch

When it comes to home maintenance and household repairs, there are two areas of "expertise" where you cannot trust internet freelancers, especially those who lack any training or experience, to have useful answers to your DIY questions. Consider this: when you have a leaky faucet, you don't call the guy who built your fence to help; you call a plumber. Why would you ask a nurse's assistant to help you wire an electrical light? Apparently, however, eHow.com thinks that's just fine; and that's why they let Cecilia Harsch tackle the topic, "How to Wire a Single-Pole Light Switch at the End of a Circuit." Harsch has already proven incompetent to address sump pumps and tilt-out windows, so we were pretty sure she hadn't a clue about basic wiring...

...and we were right. Cecilia found herself a set of directions for wiring an end-of-run switch (aka an end-of-circuit switch), but she hosed them in the reword process. The image above shows how a competent electrician would perform this little trick, and how the Antisocial Network's DIY electrician has done it in the past: the hot (black) wire bypasses the fixture and goes directly to the switch. The neutral (white) wire carries current back to the fixture, which is why it must be recoded black. The switch sits in the middle, opening and closing the current loop as it's used.

Harsch gets herself all tangled up in what color wire nuts to use (she likes orange) and what size cable to use (she likes 14/2). Duh. It's when she details the actual wiring steps that she... has problems:

Wrap the end of the white wire at the switch box with black electrical tape. Wrap the end of the white wire at the ceiling electrical box that leads back to the switch box with black electrical tape.  Recode the neutral wire: so far, so good. Connect the white wire from your power source to the white wire from the light fixture... Connect the black wire from your power source to the white wire wrapped in black electrical tape inside the ceiling electrical box. Hey, wait a minute! Twist the black wire from the switch box to the black wire from the light fixture... Well, we guess...

You see what she did there? She screwed up... or twisted up, we guess. What she should  have said as she reworded her original source(s) was:

2. Connect the hot (probably black) wire from the power source directly to the black wire from the hot side of the switch, bypassing the light.
3. Attach one end of the recoded white wire to the hot side of the switch.
4. Connect the other end of the recoded white wire to the fixture's black wire.
5. Connect the fixture's white wire to the neutral wire in the supply line.

The way Harsch describes the process violates best practices (trained electricians won't connect the recoded white wire to the hot wire) and fails to explain how the switch should be wired. We're pretty sure that an apprentice electrician would get his or her hand slapped for that kind of work and be required to pull everything out and start over. Cecilia, however, only gets a Dumbass of the Day award. We know which one we'd want wiring our house, though...

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DDIY - WIRING