wrote in message
oups.com...
We have a house built in the late 60s/early 70s that was clearly
renovated (in about 2004) by an idiot who had no concern for safety or
building codes or anything else.

We removed a heavy glass chandelier with the intention of putting in a
ceiling fan, and found that the box was clearly a plastic one designed
for lightweight lighting fixtures and not anything heavy, and
furthermore, was not secured to anything but instead was just sort of
floating in the celing. In fact, it seemed so flimsy we didn't want to
put the chandelier back up.

So we thought fine, we'll just stick in a lightweight fixture for now
until we can get a pro out to re-do the box, since we eventually want
to replace all the ceiling fixtures anyway.

However, for a few reasons related to how flimsy and badly-installed
the box is, we don't think it's really safe to put anything back on
it--the holes to screw a mounting strip onto are stripped, for one
thing, so they don't really hold securely.

How can we safely cap off the wires (power, neutral, and ground) and
put a cover on the hole in the ceiling until we can get an electrician
out to look at it and fix it? Obviously we don't want to have live
wires there but there's no way we can leave the breaker off
indefinitely.

BTW we have aluminum wiring.


You pretty much answered your own question. But I'm a little curious, the
box wasn't attached to ANYTHING? How was it kept from falling out of the
ceiling?

As for the strength of the box, it only has to meet code, the box can be as
flimsy as paper, the fixture is pulling on the walls of the box and I'm sure
even paper thin plastic can sustain 100+ lbs of tensile loading. As for a
ceiling fan, that's another story.

Personally I'd just cap the wires and go buy a box made for ceiling fans and
then crawl into the attic and start swapping. It's not that tough, before
this year I'd never done anything like that, but having done a few around
the house I find that it's nothing major.