How To Wire A Two Way Switch

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Hi there, I'm Chris from Aspect Maintenance, an electrical company based in the centre of London. Today we're going to talk about two way switching. We're going to do it on a smaller scale so you can recreate that in your domestic household on the stairways or wherever you would like to put it.

Here we have two switches, we've got a two way switch and then we've got a line two-way switch. We've chosen these just so you can be familiar with them. We've got some cable, we'll use different cable today, just sort of to make it easier for you to look onto.

Here we have the L1 and L2 points, the L1 and L2. These points will match up with each other when the cables are connected, and we've got the common and the common. One of these commons will be a continuous live which will come from the fuse board or another light if it's been looped over.

So you have your live that comes into here, we can just ignore that then from now on. You have the switch wire from here which will go to the light as such, wherever it is, whether it a light or a dependent light. And in the middle, we have between L1, between L2 and L2 we just have a continuous cable straight through like that.

Between L1 and L1 it's a continuous cable straight through, and they just swap when you hit the switches. They just flick the current between both. These will be in PVC cable or whatever you decide to use, twin and earth most likely in a domestic household.

And with the two way switch, and we did go through it quite quickly, it will be a lot more fiddly than that. You'll obviously have longer lengths of cable going up stairways and stuff. But as long as you label all of the cables at each end you shouldn't get confused, and the connection points should be a lot easier with L1 and L2 and obviously the common live and switch live going to a light.

So there you go - that's the two way switch in a domestic household.