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Each year the blog takes on a different focus. In 2019 the goal is for each post to bring you the reader a lesson, quote, message, or story that can help you grow.
Rewire
On April 22nd with the help of a great friend Joe Terranova we took on retiring three old ceiling fans by REWIRING and installing three new ceiling fans at my house.
Joe on the ladder finishing up one of the new fans.
I am not comfortable with electricity so Joe agreed to help. I took down the three old fans prior to Joe arriving. I also took a picture of how each of the fans were wired so when got to the REWIRE part we would have a guide.
Photos showing the original wiring.
What struck me as strange was two of the rooms had what I expected one wire in the ceiling outlet box (two photos above on the right). The third room (photo above on left) had two wires coming out of ceiling outlet box. To be honest I didn’t pay much attention until after I taking the fan down. I didn’t think about five wire nuts at the time being an outlier.
The ceiling outlet boxes that had one wire looked like this.
The room that had two cables coming out of the outlet box had one shown above plus what you see below. The second wire just had a white, black and green wire no red.
So things went smooth on the first fan. We assumed to retire a fan and REWIRE a new one you followed a simple formula (with all the power CUT OFF I might add). The black wire goes to the black wire, the white wire goes to the white wire, the red wire goes to the blue wire on the fan, and the green ground wires go together. Joe REWIRED and presto the fan worked.
When we got to fan #2 we encountered an issue. We forgot about 5 wire nuts (even though we had photo evidence) and went back to the formula of 4 wire nuts with all black to black, all white to white, red to blue, and green to green connections. We choose to REWIRE using 4 wire nuts. We turned on power and breaker tripped.
We then realized that this fan had five wire nuts for a reason and we tried all different combos with no luck . We then called the highly competent electrician William Townsend who installed the original fans and we asked about the five wire nuts. We wanted to know how to REWIRE correctly our instincts were not working.
He told us the procedure to REWIRE this fan was to use five connections not four. Our missing connection needed to be joining the black wire (black-white-green) with the white wire (black-white-red-green). Once we did that we could follow our previous pattern for the other four. Presto the fans worked.
In life you sometimes have to retire old habits or a career. When this occurs you need to remember that it is important to REWIRE correctly so you will have power. Sometimes your instincts are not correct and that is when the advice of a trusted professional who is competent is important.
coach4aday 
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