How to Reinforce the Ceiling & Prepare the Ceiling Fan Box

Video Transcript

"Hi! I'm Chad Smith and I'm a State Certified Journeyman wireman; basically an electrician. I'm here today with expertvillage.com and we are mounting a ceiling fan in this house today. Now we've already been through the initial steps to get to this point. We shut the power off, we tested and we removed the old ceiling fan base. I just want to take a moment here real quick to talk about the actual box that we are going to be mounting this ceiling fan to. This box is actually in very good condition and since we removed an old ceiling fan from it, it is actually reinforced and ready to go for the new ceiling fan. Now if this were a situation where this was a light or something of that nature, not a ceiling fan, you will want to reinforce this box to take the weight of the new ceiling fan. That is actually very easy to do. Don't run scared or anything. It is very easy to reinforce this box. Up in the attic you will notice that this box is between two ceiling joists. Now just go up in the attic, locate that box and take a 2 x 4 and go between the ceiling joists and lay that 2 x 4 in there and just come down here and shoot a screw up through the box up through the end of the 2 x 4. That is all it takes to reinforce this box. It is very easy to do. The other way that you could do this is your local hardware store carries a fan bracket box. It is kind of a neat little device. It is like a spreader bar with a box mounted to it. Just knock this box out and it really easy to do. Just take the new bracket, run it up through the hole, lay it flat and wrench it tight. Now when you wrench it, it takes two feet and pushes them out and hooks it onto the ceiling joists. It is very easy to do. Then you just mount the box in there. It is one of the easiest things that you can do; is mount a new box in there. For our situation here, this box is in good shape. We are going to go ahead and use it to mount our new ceiling fan base. So once you get that reinforced we are ready to go to the next step and mount a new base. I'm Chad Smith and we are hanging a new ceiling fan in this house today."