hello again everybody I'm Teri Peterman the internet electrician and welcome to another one of our video shorts on current topics here at electrical dash online.com now in today's video it's actually not all that short we're dealing with the spa light inside my built-in spa so what's happened here is the fixture itself has become faulty and it is cracked and leaking water in it now I try to repair on it that did not work so what we've got to do is replace the entire fixture from with inside the niche that's going to involve pulling out the old fixture pulling the cable out through the conduit that leads to the junction box and then pulling back in the new cable and installing the new fixture inside the niche for my spa so let's get to it so to start with replacing my light niche here I've got to go to the junction box where all the wiring in fact for the pool comes in from the panel and connects to various components of the pool system the boiler and the new Sun touch control system that I just installed a couple years ago this junction box used to house a time cloth to start and stop the pump now it just serves as a junction box so here's the spa light wires here and here's the pool light wires back in the corner now both these were hooked to the downstream side of this GFI receptacle that's on the side of the box has to give you your GFI protection and mine loops through a relay in the Sun touch to be able to control the pool lights with the remote control so what I've done here is I've disconnected the spa light fixture from this place and now I got to tie on this rope so that I have a pull wire so I'll tie that rope on and we'll pull that into the conduit and that way I've got a rope left when I go find the new light fixture that I can pull the new cable in I know because I installed this light fixture that I've got about four 90s to pull through so it was a tight pull when I put it in it's going to be just as tight of pull when I pull these wires out so I'm going to force as much of this wire loop as I can down the conduit just to help with resistance that will help the friction on that at least that first 90 and from there it should go pretty smoothly because the rest of the conduit will actually be underwater or actually under the water level so there should be a a level of water in that conduit up to a boat we'll say this height which is the level of the spa so I'll attach the rope and I'll get sandy to help me and we're going to pull this wire out from the spa and pull the rope in along behind it so one thing you don't want to happen when you're pulling that rope pulling the wire out and the rope in you definitely don't want to break have the rope pull away from the wire so you want to make sure you do a really good job of taping this up now I'm going to just wind it around the wires here several times creating a lot of friction and then tape it up with electrical tape nice and tight and smooth so we've got nothing that can get caught or snagged in the conduit on the way through trying to do this a little awkwardly so you can see what I'm up to the camera angle I've got about 8 10 inches of overlap here so that should be a lot of friction to pull that rope and there's better ways of doing this as well and actually tie the wire to the rope you've got a long long pull but I feel pretty confident that this will hold on as I pull these wires out the blue rope in okay see that I always break off the tape and leave a little tail fold it over on itself so you know where you can start to unwind that when you get to the other end so I'll get my assistant sandy to help me feed this in and I'll go in the hot tub to pull that cable out from the niche side in the spa I've removed the fixture from the niche by removing that screw which when the fixture is in place that screw hole is the top of the fixture niche the fixture just hooks into the niche at the bottom and then you fasten it in with that screw so I've removed that stainless steel screw pull the knees out as long as the cord is now so now I got to get in the tub and pull on that cable dragging in the rope behind it so that we can take this out and get it replaced I explained in the in the intro what happened to this fixture here's this where you can see I tried to fix it and it lasted for whole about three three or four months here using jb weld but when I replaced it in the spring I thought I only had a burned-out bulb so I pulled this niche or this fixture out of the knee should say and it was full of water which explained why my GFI was tripped and upon inspection I found that gasket the rubber gasket that seals it up and makes a watertight was crumbled and unchecked and worn so that's where I figured the water got in so I replaced the gasket replace the bulb put the fixture back in and it wasn't even a few hours later and the GFI tripped again so I pulled the fixture out my gasket looked good everything looked good but upon closer inspection I noticed a whole bunch of pin cracks just fine hairline cracks in the can of this fixture no I'm not I still can't explain how that happened because this is non non corrosive metal so that nothing was rusted that could have caused that all I can think of is that enough water seeped in past that bad gasket and with the halogen bulb gets extremely hot I just my theory is that the water got in there and turned the steam and actually exploded and kind of burst the can that's my theory I don't know if anybody can prove it wrong but I can't I have no other explanation for why I had all these pin cracks in the can so I repaired them with j-b weld and it's lasted about three and a half months but it started leaking again in fact I can see right there where the jb weld is separated away from the fixture cancel that's why it's leaking now it's time to go find myself a replacement hopefully I can find an LED fixture that'll pull into here after I get these wires out and we'll find a replacement pull the new wires in and hook it up and see if we have a fix so a Saturday at the other end feeding the cable down the conduit and feeding the rope in along behind I'm going to pull out this cable out of the condoms it's tough to get started okay all the cable is out of the conduit I've got the rope here I'm going to untape this and we'll leave the rope in here ready for when we have a new fixture we can pull that back in using the rope so I've picked up the new spa light it's a Pentair pool and spa light you see the model number there it's the same one as the one I pulled out so we're just going to connect the cable to the string that we pulled into the conduit and pull in the new cable remount our light make our spices in the junction box okay so I've tied a loop in my rope so that that can't come apart when you're pulling it through the conduit that's the last thing you need I've cut back the black and the white conductors just so I don't have too much bulk here and I'm going to tie the green wire around the rope twist it together and then tape this whole connection nice and tight because the last thing you want is that to pull apart inside the conduit and your fishing take this all up nice and tight another thing you want to make sure is it's all smooth so that nothing can get caught inside the conduit you should go over once and then back the other way okay so with a nice strong connection here pull that back in through the conduit nothing should pull apart give it a good tug test and we're ready to set that back into the pipe and make our connections in the junction box okay here's the other end rope coming out of the conduit I've got somebody feeding at the other end feeding the cable into the pipe and we're going to pull this in got the cable pulled into the box I've got quite a bit of extra length here comes with a 50 foot cord you want to leave enough room at the other end enough length it's not too much that you can't poke it all back into the niche but enough that you can pull the fixture back up onto the spa deck to change a light bulb in it so we'll cut this cable cut the excess off make our splices and test it out so I've made my connections all we had is a green a neutral and a hot I've got my green wire tied into the ground bus at the bottom of the panel here I've got my neutral wire coming off the neutral of the GFI the load side of the GFI and that's connected to the white now to the spa light and the white wire to the pool light and then my hot splices coming out of the load side again of the GFI it goes through a relay in my my son touch control panel and then back out of the relay on this black wire and then connects to the pool light and again black wire to the spa light so I'm ready to go turn the breaker back on reset the GFI if it was tripped and then we'll test our spa light briefly because you don't want to turn them on very long out of the water or they'll overheat and burn the ball boat right away so we just want to make sure that it's working before we go to the effort of tucking it back into the niche so we briefly turned on the light just to make sure it was working and it does so now we've got to install the light back into the niche I like to just roll the cord up around the base of the fixture itself but don't wrap the quarter on the light wrap light around the cord then you don't get it all twisted up you want to keep it as tight as you can because it's all got to fit inside that wet niche you push it into the niche hook the bottom on the little lip there and then you install your retaining screw which should be right at the top okay fixtures in place the screw lined up Phillips screwdriver Phillips head screw and you just tighten screw until it's nice and snug tug on the fixture make sure it's hooked then it's good and we're done we've replaced the pool light hopefully that doesn't happen again where it breaks apart on me and causes me to spend another couple hundred bucks replacing it but that's the end of our video for replacing a pool light fixture