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Electrical Wiring

Garage -- Adding 3-way switch

16 years ago

I have a side-entry, 2 bay, integral garage in my house. The garage ceiling is drywall, as is the firewall between the garage and the basement. I have two garage door openers and interior lighting in the garage. There is an exterior man door on one side of the garage, and an interior man door that leads from the garage to the basement. I suspect that this is a fairly typical configuration for integral garages.

There is a 3 gang switch box mounted next to the interior man door between the garage and basement area. The box contains a switch for the garage interior lights, the garage exterior lights, and the exterior flood lights. Hot comes into the box and is middle-stripped between all three switches, and then a pass-through hot is backstabbed out of each switch to service the basement lighting and each garage door opener. Personally, I don't care for this arrangement, but I didn't wire the house.

My problem is that there is no switch near the exterior man door to control the interior garage lighting. As a result, when you enter the garage through the exterior man door and the garage doors are down, there is insufficient lighting to safely make your way through the garage to reach the switch next to the interior door. It seems that the best solution to the problem is to add a switch to the garage interior lighting circuit next to the exterior man door.

However...

I can only think of two ways to accomplish this task. Run everything in conduit and surface-mount, or strategically cut the drywall ceiling in the garage (with appropriate repairs afterwards) so that I can fish the 14/3 cable through the ceiling. If I were to do the latter, I would have to fish it down the joists to the middle of the garage, where a steel I-beam runs the length of the house (and perpendicular to the joists). I could then run the cable along the I-beam, into the unfinished basement, and drop it down through the firewall where the existing wiring travels to the box next to the interior door. My only other concern with this plan is box fill on the 3 gang box (46cu in).

Does anyone have any suggestions? Anything else that I might be missing?

JKG

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Comments (3)

normel
16 years ago
Go wireless. Something like this (see link) or more sophisticated like X-10.

Here is a link that might be useful: wireless 3way
hendricus
16 years ago
Another option is to add a motion sensor to the garage lights. We have this and just leave the switch on all the time. Lights come on automatically whenever someone comes through the garage and it is dark enough to need lights.
Also a good security measure.
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Thanks ronnatalie, I should have mentioned that I do not have good access to the existing 3-way switch wiring so that's why I was asking about wireless solutions. Hopefully I can find something that will just replace one of the 3-way switches with a receiver/switch, but I haven't found anything yet.
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jgoodish
Original Author
16 years ago
Folks,

Thanks for the suggestions--they are good ones. I had never heard about the wireless solution, but perhaps that's a good answer.

I did try a motion sensor switch with 180 degree coverage. I'm not sure whether the switch was defective or whether something (like the car) was interfering with it, but coming through the man door would not activate it. In fact, I had to be about halfway into the garage to activate it from the direction of the man door. The line of sight distance from the switch location to the man door is only about 20-25 feet (and the switch's range was claimed to be 40 feet), but as I said, the car was in the garage at the time.

JKG

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