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Trying to replace three pendants lights with a single fixture that has three lights

Home Improvement Asked on September 2, 2021

I had 2 can lights and three pendant lights about 12" apart over island – they worked fine on the same switch.

I removed the three pendant lights to put in one light fixture that has three light sockets connected to it. This new light has a black and white wire coming through a rod on the left and two black and two white wires coming up the right hand rod (total of six wires), and the ground wire attached to canopy.

The two can lights are first on the line. The first pendant on left, the center pendant and then the pendant on the right (the pendant on right was the end of the line).

I capped off wires from what was the right pendant and connected the new fixture’s wires to the wires where the center pendant was hanging connecting all black wires (three from the ceiling and three from the new light fixture and then all white wires in the same manner, and then grounding with all the ground wires.

That did not work! The two can lights still come on, but nothing on the new light.

Obviously, this is not correct. What do I check next and/or redo?

One Answer

After carefully reading your description, I believe this is your wiring situation:

  • Wall Switch to...
  • First Can to...
  • Second Can to...
  • Left Pendant to...
  • Center Pendant to...
  • Right Pendant

According to your description you

  • removed the Left Pendant
  • attached the wiring at the Center Pendant to the new light
  • capped the wires at the Right Pendant

What I'm not seeing is where you connected the wires at the old Left Pendant box back together. I suspect that you had to remove all the wire nuts to get the old pendant out, but you don't indicate that you wired them back together. This means that you've got electricity coming into that box, but it's not flowing out to the center box. It's possible, of course, that you simply left that out of your description of the work done.

Also, capping the wires in the right pendant box was the correct thing to do. However, since you don't even need power going to that box at all, you can remove those wires from the bundles in the center box, putting nuts on that end, too. This will make it easier to do those center box wires since there will be one less wire in each bundle.

Be sure you put a blank cover plate on the two unused pendant boxes. It's against code to cover them with a non-removable surface, like drywalling over them. You might get away with it for the Right pendant if there's no power coming to it, but you've got a connection in the Left pendant and you cannot make that one inaccessible in case someone ever needs to get in there to fix the connection.

Answered by FreeMan on September 2, 2021

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