Lighting, Light Fixtures, Ceiling and Exhaust Fans - relocating existing tracklight in room w/o drop ceiling

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tonester
10-26-05, 12:50 AM
hello,

I am planning to relocate 2 tracklight tracks in my family room from the center of the room to the side. This room is an enclosed breezeway so there is no drop ceiling here. The existing tracks are mounted on the side of the center rafter. I want to move them to both sides of the room so the lights are point downwards towards the wall instead of upwards towards the ceiling.

What is the right way of doing this? I was planning to do the following:
-remove the existing wires from the live end of the track.
-connect the extension wire via wire connectors to the existing wire and run it across the ceiling to the new location
-remount the tracks at the new location and secure the new wires back into the live end

Would those steps do it? I've attached an image (http://img459.imageshack.us/img459/3209/tracklightrelocation1fs.jpg) for my layout

thanks
tony


John Nelson
10-26-05, 09:37 AM
Do you have attic access?

The most important thing to remember is that you may not have splices which are not contained in permanently accessible junction boxes. This means that it is often better to replace a full length of cable than to add an extension to it.

You also cannot have exposed unprotected wires or cables. I'm not sure exactly what you mean by "run it across the ceiling", but it sounds bad (both code-wise and cosmetically).

tonester
10-26-05, 10:49 AM
hi john

thanks for the reply. Unfortunately, this room does not have an attic above it. This used to be a breezeway between the garage and the house and the previous owner enclosed the space and coverted it into a family room. When I said I was going to run it across the ceiling, I meant to run it inside a wire mold across the ceiling.

So since I don't have access to the attic here, my only other choice is to just use wire connectors to connect the extension wire to the existing ones?

thanks again
tony