I am replacing my ceiling fan. I have a two switch wall box connected to a ceiling fan box with four wires coming out. One switch controls the light and the second switch controls the fan. In the ceiling box, I have a ground, black, white and red wires. The fan that I want to install only has a ground, black, and white wire. I am assuming that the red wire is supposed to control the light or fan separately, but don’t know where to connect that wire to on the fan, either the black or white wire?
A:
The ceiling wiring is typically black for fan, red for light, white for neutral for both fan and light, bare for ground. If you confirmed whether black fed the fan and red fed the light before you took apart the old fan wiring, then you are good for which black/red wire is for which switch. If not, you have a 50/50 chance you’ll wire it up correctly for the new fan, or you may have to swap red & black. (You can – carefully – test the black and red wires with a voltmeter to see which switch controls which wire. Please ask another question about how to do this safely.)
The following assumes the (black – fan) (red – light) wiring scheme.
If your fan has a remote control:
The fan and light in your new single-black fan are designed to be controlled only by the remote control. So power gets fed through the fan’s black wire to the remote control receiver, which independently controls the light and fan.
If you want to use the remote control to fully control the fan, wire this way:
fan black to ceiling black
fan white to ceiling white
fan ground to ceiling ground
cap the ceiling red with a wire nut so the bare end is fully covered
leave the fan switch turned on all the time.
If you don’t want to use the remote control to control the fan, take the fan back and get one that doesn’t use a remote control.
If your fan does not have a remote control:
The fan is wired to have both fan and light come on at the same time. (Must be an old fan, separate fan/light control is pretty ubiquitous in non-remote-control ceiling fan wiring.) Take it back and get a fan with separate wires for fan and light.
Then wire the fan to black, the light to red, etc.