I need help changing a light switch

DISCLAIMER: I am not an electrician but I have installed similar home automation switches. Get more advice and maybe talk to a proper electrician before wiring this in since you could damage the switch or cause worse issues if done wrong.

Anyway....

The new WiFi switch needs constant power so you will have to do things a little different here. The black wires on the WiFi switch will connect to the red and black wires on the mechanical switch. The WiFi switch should tell you which wire is the constant (hot/live) and you might need to figure out if the black wire from the box is the constant hot/live or if the red one is (test light of multimeter). You will need to undo the wire nut that secures the two white wires together and add your WiFi switch's white wire (neutral). May need a bigger wire nut for that. The green wire will connect to the bare copper wire (ground). Hopefully others in this thread will tell us if I am correct on not so we can get you going in the right direction. Ultimately I would ask a real electrician to be on the safe side so take this info as purely educational and possibly incorrect. Good luck and be safe.

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BelowAboveAverage 5.8 years ago

Thank you. This helped. I just installed and it works.

The red was on the on side, so I figured it was the hot, and it was.

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Morbo 5.8 years ago

Fantastic! Glad it worked out and didn't let the magic smoke out of the switch or your house.

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My_Name_is_Not_Sure 5.8 years ago

Any idea why that red wire is in there? I’m only used to seeing a red wire in D.C. applications.

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Morbo 5.8 years ago

In the US, the 120 volt wire color code has the hot/live wire as either black, red or blue so the red wire is a standard for hot/live. It seems crazy when thinking about the DC colors, but that's not really a standard anyway despite what we've all been led to believe. AC color coding is standard so we will go with that.