Putting a ceiling fan where the light is now starts with what is above the ceiling

Trading one ceiling light for another is a swap. Putting a fan where a light was usually is not, and the part of the room that decides how much work it takes is the part nobody sees, the space on the other side of the ceiling. In Lockport that follows the age of the house closely enough to sort by it.

Can a ceiling fan go where the light is now?

In nearly every room, yes. The box over a ceiling light was made to carry a few pounds of fixture that never moves, and a fan weighs more and rocks a little every time it runs. So the question behind ceiling fan installation in Lockport is the box and what holds it up. A box already rated for a fan, with a wall switch, means the fan gets hung. Anything else means a new box and brace first, and a higher price.

What holds it up is the half that matters most. A fan box has to be fastened to a joist, or to a brace that spans the two joists on either side of the light. An old light box is often nailed to a strip of wood or screwed to the drywall, and it can sit there for decades with a light on it. Under a fan, that kind of mount works loose.

How do you tell if the box in the ceiling will hold a fan?

From the floor, with the fixture still up, you mostly cannot. A fan-rated box is marked on the inside, and that marking only shows once the fixture comes down, which is the electrician’s part of the visit. What you can see from below are the signs that an old light box is unlikely to pass:

• the spot has always had a light, and no fan has ever hung there
• a small, flat fixture canopy, which often means a shallow round pancake box behind it
• a fixture that sits crooked or shifts when someone walks across the floor above
• a house built before 1930

Any one of those and it is worth planning on the new box. A heavy fixture raises the same question. A big chandelier over the dining table or a wide drum light in a foyer puts real weight on the box, and the box gets the same look before anything goes up.

What changes when there is an attic above the room, and when there is a floor?

An open attic overhead lets the brace go in from above. A finished floor overhead means the brace goes in through the hole in the ceiling, and nothing upstairs gets opened. Nearly every room in a Lockport house has one or the other above it, and which one it is decides how long the box takes and how much of the ceiling gets touched.

The 1960s and 70s brick ranches west of downtown toward Crest Hill are one story, so every bedroom sits under the attic. The electrician goes up through the hatch, pulls the insulation back from the spot, sets a brace across the joists on either side of the light, and lays the insulation back over it before coming down. From the room, the only change is the fan.

In the two-stories on the 159th Street side, built 1995 to 2010, the first-floor ceilings have the second floor’s joists right on top of them, and there is no way in from upstairs short of pulling up flooring. Those rooms get a brace made to go in through the box opening and spread until it bears on the joists. The drywall hole may grow a little to fit the new box, and the fan canopy covers it. The bedrooms on the second floor of the same houses sit under the attic and go the ranch way.

Fairmont and the downtown bluff are the slow case. The foursquares and bungalows there have plaster on wood lath, a floor above the first-floor rooms and often a closed attic over the second floor with no real hatch. The old box may be a shallow, rusted pan hung from a strip of lath instead of a joist. Plaster cracks if it is cut like drywall, so the opening is scored and cut slowly before the brace goes in through it. Now and then the wire at that box turns out to be knob-and-tube still feeding the ceiling light, and most electricians will not hang a fan on it. Then the run to that light gets replaced before the fan goes up, a small piece of rewiring an older house.

What about a vaulted great room or a two-story foyer?

These are the rooms in the newer two-stories where a fan helps most and goes up hardest. A sloped ceiling takes a mount made for the angle and a downrod sized so the blades clear the slope at that pitch, while a foyer two stories tall wants the fan low enough to move air where people stand. A long downrod swings more than a flush fan does, so the box has to take that sideways pull as well as the weight. Most of these ceilings are well past a household stepladder, and the height is one of the things that moves the price within its range.

The room has a wall switch but no ceiling light. Is that a bigger job?

Somewhat bigger, and common in the ranches toward Crest Hill, where many bedrooms were built with the wall switch running an outlet for a lamp and no box in the ceiling at all. A fan there needs a new fan-rated box and brace, plus a new switch leg run from the wall switch up to the ceiling.

With the attic overhead, that run goes up inside the wall to the top plate and across the attic to the new box, so the wall itself is rarely opened. On the first floor of a two-story the run has to cross a closed ceiling, which takes longer.

A new box and a new switch leg are new work in the City’s eyes rather than a fixture swap, the gray area the page on which electrical work needs a Lockport permit describes, and most electricians pull the permit for it.

On the price list, a fan on a box that is already fan-rated, with the switch in place, runs $150 to $350 and takes about an hour on an existing box. A fan where there was only a light runs $350 to $600, for a new fan-rated box and brace and a switch leg where the room needs one. A bedroom with no ceiling box at all needs those same pieces, and how far the switch leg has to travel is part of what the electrician prices. The height of the ceiling and the access above it move a job around inside those ranges, and the electrician gives you the number on the phone once you say which ceiling you have.