How To Wire 3 Position Selector Switch To Stacklight from AutomationDirect

have you tried to wire something simple and had to stop for a minute to understand the circuit or maybe even had to grab a meter or even sketch out a diagram on the paper well you're not alone in this video I'll show you how to wire up a three-position switch to three outputs on the stack light sounds simple right I was recently wiring up one of our three light stack lights from cutler hammer and wanted to use a simple three position switch to control each color light in the stack light when I ordered one of our 22 millimeter three-position maintained selector switches I realized the contacts are only too wide how do i wire the third set of contacts and isolate them from the first two after grabbing my handy multimeter and figuring out the circuit I thought it'd be beneficial to make a video and show others in order to save them time and frustration so in this video I'll use a 22 millimeter three-position maintained selector switch to control the three lights on my stack light I also added in a two position illuminated LED selector switch to control power to the whole circuit and an LED pilot light to show when the power is on I'm organizing and mounting all of this in one of our nonmetal 22 millimeter push-button enclosures let me mention this if you don't have the skills or the knowledge to work with electricity we suggest hiring or finding someone that does so you and your system remain safe the whole system is 120 volts ac I chose this route to keep it simple if I chosen DC voltage I would have to use an additional power supply like one of these by simply staying with 120 volts ac I can keep my component cost low in wiring to a minimum I had to make sure when purchasing my lights and the illuminated buttons that they're rated for 120 volts ac the contacts on the selector switches will work with either AC or DC voltages so no worries there first I bring in the supply voltage and using the hot wire I can control the supply voltage to the rest of the system you can see how I wired the illuminated switch and my pilot light next I need to supply voltage through the three position switch to each color of the stack light the first two contacts are normally open contacts and are actuated when the selector is rotated to the far left or far right easy enough but how do I control voltage to the center position without the left and right being affected like most selector switches you can stack up to three layers of contacts so I could theoretically have six total contacts on a switch too wide and 3d so I mounted a normally closed contact on the second level that works right wrong it worked in the center position and in the left position but when I selected the right position it stayed on along with the contact below so how do i isolate the center position with contacts I added a second normally closed contact and put a jumper between the two normally closed contacts you can see with the meter this is how it works now I wire up my supply voltage to these contacts and then on to the stack light let's focus on the stack light real quick the base has a connector that will accommodate up to six lights and a stack here we only have three lights so I'll only wire up the first three terminals we have a common which I'll connect up to the neutral wire then the positive wires will be fed from our selector switch contacts to the appropriate stack light colors last I clean up my wiring check all connections and tuck it all the way inside of this box in order to keep it safe and organized now let's test out the final product power on the LEDs light up and the selector switch is to the left so I have it tied to red center it's tied to yellow and right it's tied to green power back off and it works like we wanted to know I could have used several styles of products in this demo but I already had a couple of the components in my stock so I chose the color hammer stack light automationDirect also sells Verma brand stack lights with many colors and bulb styles the selector switches and pilot lights are available in many styles colors voltages and sizes so check out all the product offerings that we have and see how many combinations we could have used today keep this in mind for all your automation needs thanks for watching and we hope to see you again soon