Hi Not so much as a problem, as a curiosity and a question. New house: The picture below is of the ceiling wiring that was behind an oversized remote control ceiling fan and lamp. As you can see there's three sets of wires, all in the old-school colouring. The three red wires are connected together and were NOT connected to the fan/light at all. The three earth wires are connected together and were connected to the fan/light earth. One of the black wires was connected to live on the fan/light Two of the black wires were connected together and connected to neutral on the fan/light The parcel tape labeled "br" and "bl" is just my labels to indicate they were attached to live/brown and neutral/blue. I'm 'guessing' that one of the wiring sets is fed from the light switch, and the other two are connected to a non switched circuit. This could potentially allow the light/fan to retain fan operation even when the light switch was 'off'. I don't know if the fan could do this as we never used the fan and I'm not about to hang the beast back up. Sound a reasonable assumption? But the main question is, is it possible for this setup to have ever worked? IE is it possible to run a light and/or fan by only connecting it to neutral wires? Or is it more likely (seeing as the light/fan definitely did work okay) that some of that black/red wiring is mis-coloured? Basically, what's going on? I have a multimeter so can test, but mains electricity isn't a speciality and really don't know what specifically to test for to identify what is live/neutral switched/permanent etc. Current plan is to get our friendly electrician in and sort it for us, this would also save me climbing in the tiny fibreglass filled attic and belly crawling behind the water tank to move a ceiling rose in another bedroom. So if there's any sparkies in the bit-tech house to help before I call in the pros? Ta muchly (Turn your head to the left. Damn phone/computer/bit-tech gallery)
Of those three cables, one is for switch, one is power from breaker/fuse in DB, and one is loop to next light etc. They've wired this so that the fan/light combo can be switched off at the wall. Switch off means that neither fan or light can work. Does your fan/light only have one live? Most fans have a seperate live for the light and fan, so that you can switch the light off seperately, but since this is a remote controlled unit, all control is on the remote. Edit: Forgot to mention: The reason they have used the black wire to go to the fan/light live is because its a two core cable. More economical to use the other free wire (the black one) as the return from the switch than to run a seperate live to keep the correct colour.
One of the blacks will simply be a "switched live" from the switch box. Someone should've put a piece of red sleeve over it to indicate as such - I'm guessing that was the "br" labelled one? As for the rest, it looks like they've use the ceiling rose as a junction box for another circuit. It's quite a common, albeit lazy, way to avoid fitting a proper junction box - in my old house, the previous owner used the upstairs landing light fitting as a junction box for ALL the upstairs lighting!
Ceiling fan/light combos normally have two pull cords that enable you to turn off the fan and light independently. The switch at the wall kinda acts like a 'master' on/off. You can probably just attach a light fitting to the two black wires and use the wall switch as normal. If you don't have one spare they are £2.40 from screwfix
I labeled it br (For brown) as it was going into the live connection on the fan/light. Some red sleeve sure would have been nice. The fan/light only has one set of connections, the standard L, N & E.
