Wiring a 4 Way Circuit to Control Lights

Welcome back to the channel. A few weeks ago I put out the video showing the three-way circuit in my garage and if you remember it was the three-way circuit was used to turn the lights on and off at two different places. So since I have two doors then I wanted to be able to turn the light on as I come in one door and then if I decide to leave out of the other door I can turn the light off over there. And so I thought it would be a good idea to put out a video on a four-way circuit and what those are used for is controlling the lights from more than two places. You can put as many four-way switches in as you need within reason and so if you had a big garage and say you had four doors you could actually hook this up and put enough switches to where you can control the lights from four different places or five different six however many switches you want to put in you can control from that many places. So here's a simple four-way circuit to control the light and I caught a little bit of flack because I was calling this Romex and the reason I called it Romex is because I don't intend for these videos to be used to train people how to do electricity formally. I just want homeowners to be able to walk into Home Depot and go talk to the nice old man and tell him that hey I need you know wire for whatever I'm doing and you don't need to go in there and use a So since I make these videos for my friends and for homeowners that just want to be able to do this stuff by themselves I'm gonna call it Romex. If you want to crucify me on YouTube go ahead and put it in the comments that it has a specific term that's fine. So this Romex is the 14-2 so it has the two wires and as another part of the circuit just like in the three-way switch there's three wires in this 14-3 and the reason we need the three wires because we need to use this traveler wire in our circuit. So just like in the other video you have your panel box with all your breakers here in the middle and your two bus bars on the side where your neutral and your grounds are connected. These wires could have easily been put over here as well. So we have our breaker and you'll see the black wire travels along through the Romex up to this first screw. Now don't get confused when you see these switches you'll notice on a typical single switch you'll just have two screws on the side and nothing on the other side and that's just because you're just controlling the black wire. But on a three and a four-way circuit you need special switches so you know that this is a three-way switch because it has the black screw where the power comes in and then you have the two screws at the bottom for your traveler wires and then if you come over here to the next switch you have one, two, three, four screws and that's important because all this all this four-way switch is doing is controlling your travelers. So as the power comes through into the black screw it'll leave through one of these screws depending on if the switch is up or down. So let's just say that with a switch being down the power goes in this in the black screw and comes out this gold screw. Then the power goes along through the black wire up to our next switch. Now let's say with this switch being down it breaks the circuit to this other black wire over here. So now we flip this switch up it'll allow the power to travel through through the screw and continue on in this circuit. And then we come to our second three-way switch and you'll notice that the travelers are up at the top now and these switches obviously they're gonna be in a box or something so I could have just easy drawn the circuit with the travelers at the bottom. I just chose to do it this way. And so you have the black wire coming in hits the gold screw and then depending on if this switch is up or down it'll allow the power to go through the black screw here through the black wire and up to your light and complete the circuit. Keep in mind that these all of the neutral wires are always connected. You'll see in my other videos how they were always wired up together so they constantly form a solid connection all the way up to the light. And then it's just the black wire or in this case in some cases with this circuit with the red traveler wire if the power depending on which way the switch is going if the power is going to go through the red wire and complete the circuit. But the gold, the copper wire, the ground wire, and I just also showed this wire being green because sometimes you'll see these as green wires as well and those are the colors of markers that I have. And so you've kind of seen I think if you watch the other videos you've seen how these are connected up. So really what you want to focus on in this video is how the power is being directed through these switches. You want to make sure that the wires from one end of the circuit are going to two screws on the bottom and then the wires from the other part of the circuit are going to the top and that they don't get switched. Because think of this as kind of an X. As the power comes into either one of these you flip the switch it's either going to send the power to either other screw and if you get these wrong obviously your circuits either can always be on or always be off. So just one more look at this circuit before I get out the live circuit that I made. So of course do all this electrical work at your own risk and I'm sure some of you are not going to like the next portion of this but I did make a live circuit and all I did is I just put a plug end on that I'm going to plug into an electrical cord. So you're going to come down and the wires coming into the black screw and then you have your two traveler wires at the bottom and then of course you have your whites hooked up and your ground screw has a pigtail where it comes over and connects to the other two wires. Then you come down to your three wire where you have your travelers coming in the bottom of the switch. Once again your grounds and your neutrals connected. I don't know why you can see it but behind here the traveler wires are connected. Same thing on the next switch connect it up ground wires connected neutral wire connected. So the traveler wires out of the second switch and into the bottom of the three-way switch and then of course we have our black wire coming out and up to our light. Same thing with our neutral up to our light. So once again please no crazy comments. I know this a little bit dangerous. I'm wearing gloves and aren't going to conduct anything and like I said I've used these a few times so it's a little bit dangerous but it's gonna be okay. I don't have a use for a four-way circuit. I just want you to see that this is actually gonna work. So let's say you set this up in your shop and you walk into your shop turn the light on and there's your light and then you've got another door put the switch the lights off then you can come back in another door turn it on turn it off and then same thing here. So just one last little bit of proof turn the first switch on and the other one on. One of the main reasons I wanted to make this video is you might have a place to where this circuit would be ideal for your situation. So we greatly appreciate everybody who has subscribed to our channel and we really appreciate the comments and the interaction we get with people. We're gonna keep trying to get better at this YouTube thing. I know a lot of the times I'm sitting there stumbling through things because I'm trying to think about stuff and trying to look in the camera. I'm still getting used to that but I hope we could keep putting out decent content that people can use and once again we appreciate watching.