How Do Dimmer Switches Work?

Video Transcript

"Hi! I'm Chad Smith and I'm a State Certified Journeyman wireman; basically an electrician. I'm here with expertvillage.com today and we just finished installing a ceiling fan in this house. I just want to take a brief moment and talk about dimmer switches and multi-control of your ceiling fan. In our application, we had just a single pull switch so we only had a black and a white which controls the ceiling fan and the light together. They are not independent. You may find in your situation you have what I mentioned earlier a red and a black and a white and that way if you have a red and black and white, you can control the ceiling fan and the light separately. In our application, we just have a single wire so we just have a single switch. The switch worked just fine and it is still in good condition so we wired it to control the ceiling fan and the light together. But if you find that you have the single wire application and you would like to have the dual application where you can control the light and the fan separately, that would involve pulling some wire between the light and the switch to gain that control. So if you have that situation, then you can just put a dimmer switch in for those and that way you can control it separately. I'm Chad Smith and we just finished installing this ceiling fan today."