I have a ceiling fan/light in my bedroom that I want to replace with a standard light. The issue is that the ceiling fan and light can only be operated by remote. There is a single hardwired switch in the room, but it just controls the outlet by my bed.
I had this naive assumption that when the bedroom was originally wired, there would be some provision made for physical controlling the ceiling light, but as far as I can tell that’s not the case. I’m wondering what my options are:
Presumably I can pay an electrician to install a physical switch.
Are there remote units I can install in the fixture so that I can turn a “normal” overhead light into one that operates with a remote switch?
Would it make sense to install an “always on” fixture that doesn’t have a switch at all, and then put a smart bulb in it that I can control via my phone?
Other ideas? Recommendations?
A:
The starting point is a requirement that most rooms are required to either have a light on all the time or a switch near the entrance that controls either an overhead light or a receptacle that you can use to plug in a lamp.
Builders are cheap. Therefore they have the switch control a receptacle that they already have to install anyway, saving the cost of installing an overhead light. The usual exceptions are kitchens and bathrooms. Bedrooms, living rooms, sometimes even dining rooms will just have a switched receptacle.
Most people I know, given a choice, prefer switched ceiling lights. But it is an open debate as to which is better. One of the very first things I had done in my house when moving in was to install ceiling lights in the bedrooms and change the switches to operate the ceiling lights and not the receptacles. But I have gone into plenty of houses and found that people have lived in their houses for decades without realizing they could get this done. And even worse, they’ll have a computer or other “always on” devices plugged into the switched receptacle and a piece of tape or a note on the switch “never turn off”. Crazy!
My hunch is your house came with the switched receptacle and somebody later added the ceiling fan/light. Since many ceiling fans now come with remotes, they just didn’t worry about not being able to switch the fan/light totally off.
But you can change that.
The first step is to find out where the existing ceiling fixture gets power from. If it is on the same circuit as your switched receptacle then there is a chance the wiring actually passes through or next to the switch box. In that case the fix is easy – connect it to the switch and rewire the switched receptacle so that it provides full-time hot/neutral to the switch and the receptacle is always on.
But if that is not the case then the way to fix this is to run a new cable (might be able to move the existing cable, depending on how it was installed) from the ceiling fixture to the switch box and then rewire the switch and receptacle. The exact specifics will depend on the configuration of the ceiling fixture box, switch box and receptacle box (pictures please!) and of course a lot depends on how easy it is to run a new cable through the ceiling and wall.