The ceiling box has 2 lives and you want to connect to the one that has power, if only one does.
I have that exact setup in 6 rooms in my house. I asked for it. There are 2 switches on the wall. One controlling the red and one controlling the black. I use this setup to control fan and light separately, without having to go pulling on chains. This was in 1998 and remotes and factory supplied controllers were for the rich.
The white is neutral. You connect the white to the white and that won't change.
Your instructions tell you to connect to black because they assume that's what's in the ceiling box. The colour, red or black, is irrelevant. You use whichever one is good. You need to know where the other end of each of those wires is and how they're getting 120V. Since they presumably are in the same cable then they must be together at the other end. Is it in the switch box on the wall? With your wireless remote, do you intend to leave the wall swich on at all times? I assume there is a wall switch. You need to test which of the 2 wires in the ceiling has 120V when you want it to. Try both wires each with the switch on AND off. Why the black one doesn't have 120V could be a simple matter of flicking a switch. Or maybe the black is not connected to anything in the switch box and the red is getting power from the switch. So you can just do the swap(after your tests show the red has power) to red and see what happens, or pull out the switch on the wall to see what's up.
Last edited on Wed Jul 14th, 2010 04:21 pm by madbrad
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