If you remember the first post About My New Home, I kinda touched a bit about the switches being dirty. Since the picture of the switches were a bit small on that post I took the liberty to take a close up for all of you.
Kitchen Switches And Sockets. Dirtiest of the lot.
Living Room Switches. Just slightly cleaner.
Before I continue rattling on, Switches and Sockets are a bit of a handful to type so from here onwards I shall refer to them as “SS”.
The SS in the picture looks darn icky right? Only about 5 years of usage and it’s in that condition (If your SS is looks like the picture above, shame on you!). I do not even wish to attempt to clean it as I think it’s gonna be a futile effort. So I’m doing what I can only do right now, change all the SS in the house.
Since I’m changing them, might as well look for some better looking SS. No point just replacing them with the exact design right? So I recall this brand Clipsal, a brand that I first came to contact with when I was doing this Home Automation project for a Condo few years back. They had this very nice looking Clipsal switch installed, so nice and elegant.
So I’m sure you’ve guessed it by now, I’m gonna be using Clipsal SS to replace the disgusting SS I have now.
Again, I’m shall DIY change the SS. I went to this shop at Ubi Industrial Estate and got all my SS there. The shops name is Nancy Quek Electrical Supplies & Service. They quoted me the lowest price for the SS so far and the guy there, William was really helpful. I highly recommend you look for this guy if you want to change your SS. I ended up paying about $200 bucks to get all the SS that I need including water heater switch, telephone port and doorbell.
It’s not really hard to change these SS. Just arm yourself with a test pen and be careful. First of all, turn off the mains. Well you don’t have to do it but since we’re amateurs, just to be safe. I tripped the power for the whole house while trying to test the the sockets with a test pen (I suspect the test pen was faulty). Then just unscrew the existing SS and remove the wires, taking a mental note of which wires go where.
Taking Switches and Phone Port apart.
There are basically 3 types of wires which are colour coded.
- Live – Red in colour
- Neutral – Black in colour
- Earth – Green with yellow stripes in colour
These colours for my home were based on international standards before year 2004. Please do check which standards you wiring are colour coded to. For normal cases, just connect the wiring to their respective locations which is demarcated on each SS. Special case such as water heater which is a 20 amp switch are slightly more complicated.
After 3 hours, I managed to replace all the SS.
Socket, Phone Port and Blank Plate.
2 Gang Light Switch And Heater
All looks good, right?.. Not really. Made a boo boo.
Feature wall 2 gang light switch. Notice the sides.
Should have changed the SS before painting. Removing the SS after painting cause some paint to peel off. Will have to patch up the paint soon. Overall, quite pleased again to have DIY the SS myself. Getting an electrician to do the job will probably cost about $4 – $5 per socket or switch from what I hear. So some savings here again whereby the money will go to good use on other parts of the house……