My house was built in the early 90's and the builder, rather than installing bathroom fans, wired the air exchanger unit to all of three of the bathrooms and installed local mechanical timers to turn the unit on. Works OK, would have put fans in myself, but anyway...
So now as I renovate one of the bathrooms, I thought I would like to replace 2 mechanical timers (one for the aforementioned air exchanger and one that I have repurposed from my now-removed whirlpool tub pump into a switch for the lights I installed in the new shower.
The light switch wiring looks like what I would expect - neutrals wired together, black wires to the timer, ground to the box. On the other hand, the air exchanger timer has only 2 wires (see photo, it is on the right) - a black and a white of smaller gauge than the house wiring. I assume one is power to the timer and the other runs back to the load (i.e. air exchanger to turn it on when the timer is activated). I would like to replace both of these with same or very similar timers - ideally the ones that have preset 5-10-20-30 min buttons. Can it be done? Is there any way to take advantage of having the neutral wire in the box for the light timer to use it for the air exchanger timer?
So now as I renovate one of the bathrooms, I thought I would like to replace 2 mechanical timers (one for the aforementioned air exchanger and one that I have repurposed from my now-removed whirlpool tub pump into a switch for the lights I installed in the new shower.
The light switch wiring looks like what I would expect - neutrals wired together, black wires to the timer, ground to the box. On the other hand, the air exchanger timer has only 2 wires (see photo, it is on the right) - a black and a white of smaller gauge than the house wiring. I assume one is power to the timer and the other runs back to the load (i.e. air exchanger to turn it on when the timer is activated). I would like to replace both of these with same or very similar timers - ideally the ones that have preset 5-10-20-30 min buttons. Can it be done? Is there any way to take advantage of having the neutral wire in the box for the light timer to use it for the air exchanger timer?
- TL;DR
- 2 wire mechanical timer - how do I replace with a newer model
