I have a new LED ceiling light fixture that I got to replace an old T12 fluorescent light in our kitchen which stopped working. After turning off the breaker, verifying that there was no power to ceiling fixture with a voltage pen, I removed it noting that it was only connected to a black wire and a white wire in the ceiling box.
New light has white wire, black wire and a ground wire. I connected the white wire to white and black wire to black, but am now stumped on where to connect the ground. The LED does get voltage as the no-contact pen lights up when I switched the breaker back on (yes, I was careful not to touch the fixture when it did that).
I've enclosed pictures of the junction box (1st & 2nd pictures) as in there I see a white wire spliced to a black one (red wire nut), plus on the right side of the junction box are what looks to be a black wire and a dark brown one – unless that's just discoloring from age – wrapped in some black cloth tape (orange wire nut).
Tell me what I'm doing wrong and thanks in advance for any help.
Best Answer
The cable entering from the left is just old wire whose marks have faded or was never polarized in the first place. I'm not worried about that. Pretend one is white and one is black.
The box is entirely ungrounded and the old Romex cables do not have a ground wire. Again, not worried about that. Just leave it dangle. It's not that I don't like grounds, this is just a pretty low priority as it's unlikely to be touched by humans, and is probably going to be in a GFCI envelope anyway.
What concerns me is it doesn't look quite right for a switch loop. It looks like there's only one wire on the orange nut, which us weird. Which makes the red wire nut seem superfluous. Just rubs me wrong is all.
Nonetheless, the worst mistake you can make is take apart wire nuts or wires other than the two conductors (and ground if present) that directly lead to the old lamp.
Are you sure you didn't pull a wire out of the orange nut and put it back on the red nut? Does the switch still turn the light on and off? does power enter this box even with the switch off? Was there ever a second light location also controlled by this switch?