The laundry room in our apartment is supposed to use some overhead fluorescent lights, but they are the long tube style and rather than go out and buy some more (our landlord is horrible, it’s APM if anyone is thinking of living in Tillman Place in Clemson) I decided to wire up a standard light bulb base to the light switch in the laundry room so we wouldn’t have to do the laundry in the dark. (Also, in this picture the bulbs had already been removed)
I scavenged the light bulb base from the lamp I built for my apartment in Charleston (that was a previous project and is on this blog), then found a long power cable meant for a computer and cut both ends off and stripped the black (hot) and green (ground) wires. Then I attached one side of this cable to the light bulb base. After removing the light switch cover to reveal the switch, I attached the green wire to the ground wire inside the wall. Hopefully every light switch fixture has a ground wire somewhere. I attached the black wire to the top of the light switch at the screw-type terminal. Normally, an electric device would be connected to black (hot) and white (neutral) instead of green (ground), but most switches only cut off the power going to the high side of the device, so having the white wire around is unnecessary. In this case, it looked like it was actually there in the wall but I was not sure enough to go grabbing at random wires that were deep in the wall. While the green wire is normally used for safety, as long as the electricity is getting back to where it came from, green or white will work just fine.
After reattaching the light switch to the wall and hollowing out some of the side so the power cable would fit, I hung the wire and the light bulb base from the shelves above the washer and drier. Tada!
That’s probably not up to code. ATTENTION FUTURE EMPLOYERS: If I’m working for you then I will do everything to code and it will be extremely safe. I promise. I’m just a poor college student who doesn’t want to pay for light bulbs.
Also, on a completely unrelated note, and mostly since I had the camera out already, here is my ukulele!
