Ceiling fan

[forgotten_aria]

I installed a hunter ceiling fan today.

I'm glad I read the reviews that the directions were bad, because they were.

First the "shipping blocks" were actually a piece of metal that was screwed in so tightly I stripped out a screw. Sadly we didn't find out that they had shipped one extra of each screw until it was already too late.

Secondly getting all the wires up in the canopy was, as expected, hard. Luckily we re-watched the installation video for the remote box and found where the box is supposed to live.

There is another screw I would have replaced, given the chance.

I can't say the globe holding design impresses me.

Other than that, it went ok, though it was a number of very tiring steps as well as some good forethought on my part, like putting a towel over the holes in the fan to keep the screws from dropping in during installation.

Our ladder isn't quite tall enough.

Comments

[coffeekitty.livejournal.com]

the pull chains on ceiling fans always make me think of those barnacle monsters in half-life 2. i half expect to hear crunching noises from their general direction.

[byakkodan-slash.livejournal.com]

We have the most god-awful light fixture in our master bedroom. It's one of those brass things from the early 80's that hangs from a chain and has that cheap printed on glass effect that's supposed to make it look sandblasted, but it's not. I want to replace it with a fan, and I'm fairly handy. I've shied away because it involved electricity, in which I have very little experience with, and I'm terrified that I won't hook it properly into the ceiling beam, and it'll shake itself loose one night onto our sleeping bodies.

How easy was the electrical hook up? Could I, with physical construction experience, safely handle it with instructions/online tutorials?

[forgotten-aria.livejournal.com]

Well I would say part of that depends on your house. Our old house... I wouldn't have touched the electrical there if you'd paid me. This house happens to be new construction so I felt I could trust that the wires were colored correctly and that the switch and breakers would actually turn the power off (I've seen old houses where turning a breaker off would turn another circuit on, scary.) We also have a proper fan box already installed. I know there are two types of fan boxes you can install, and the installation might be a bit tricky or require the removal of part of the ceiling.

If you trust your house writing, then it wasn't too bad. We have a remote for the fan, so that was a little extra wiring, but it was basically black to black, white to white, use electrical nut. Grounds all nutted together.

Truth be told I have an electrical phobia (I have trouble jumping my car without going into hysterics) but in this case I trusted the house enough and it was simple enough I felt comfortable doing it.

You can buy a neat little tool that will tell you if a wire is live without putting yourself at all in danger. I recommend getting it.

The videos did help me a lot, but of course made everything look simpler than it was.

[byakkodan-slash.livejournal.com]

Hm, my house is 100 years old with Lord knows how many updates and remodels through the years. So probably not then. I'll wait for my father to fly in in the spring to help me out-- he's an actual electrician. That just means that I have to stare at this ugly light fixture until then.