Mounting The Base Box of a Ceiling Fan To The Ceiling

Video Transcript

"Hi! I'm Drew Finn and I am here for expertvillage.com. I am a professional home inspector and we are going to show you how to install a ceiling fan today. Now we are going to mount the base box to the ceiling and I wanted to just explain to you what we are up to. This is going to hold the whole weight of 50 pound, it could be 50 pounds depending on the fan you have so that the attachment to the ceiling is absolutely critical. You need to go on to a structural element of that. You need structural screws. This is a a good heavy screw. We are going to put two of them in that will attach it to the structural element. We don't want you going in to the sheet rock or plaster with small sheet metal screws. You need one that has a good shank on it so that it is structurally sound and we'll screw that right up in to secure the box up in there. They make special boxes for the ceiling where the screws go in and they are longer screws and they mount really securely. Once this is mounted up in there, I am just going to demonstrate how those go together because again it is harder to see when it is up above. Okay, so we take the screws out. We've got the mounting bracket which came with a fan. We simply aligned it up where the screw holes are and put the screws in. Obviously it is a lot easier to do here than when it is up on the ceiling which we will be doing; this is just for demo purposes and we tighten the screws. Now the actual screws that we will be using for the structural mount are much longer than this because they thread in a two threaded section. If you are on a slope ceiling, you want to make sure the hooks on the downward side, not the upward side. If it was on upward side, the fan could easily fall off so when you are installing it if it is on the lower side, so it would be sloped like this. Now let's go up and we will mount the bracket to the ceiling and we will start the ceiling assembly. "