How to Install a Mirror Defogger

So we've purchased a mirror online, and there's a few things you wanna look at when you're purchasing a mirror. And that is you wanna try to get a mirror that doesn't have a backing attached to it. This one does, so what we've done is we've taken that backing off so we can get our good connection to the back of the mirror.

When you get your mirror, the first thing you want to do is you want to measure it the available space you have in the back because that's going to tell you what size defogger you can use. So let's measure our mirror.

What we wanna do now is measure our mirror and see what size we have. And this is just a little bit less than twenty inches. Now, thing to keep in mind is we don't have twenty inches of available space behind. There's part of this cardboard left behind or this fiber board. We should see how much space we actually have inside of that twenty inches, and we have about seventeen and a half, eighteen inches. That means our fifth teen inch unit will fit in here perfectly.

Let's take a look at the back of the defogger.

The defogger is fifteen inches round, but if you take a look, at the power entry point, it is not in the center. It's off center, a little bit towards the top. And you wanna keep that in mind when you're putting it on the wall because you want this power entry point to be very close to the location of the box in the wall.

We're ready now to put this on the wall and get an idea of where we want it at which height. So we have to remember that our mirror is a little bit bigger than this, but you want to be able to look into the mirror and see yourself when the rest of the room is foggy. So, right now, I'm six one, and I wanna make sure that I can see myself.

And then if you have a significant other, someone who is shorter, a housemate or something like that, is put it at a height that they would be able to see themselves. So I'm going to mark the location of it right now, and we're going to use this to help us locate our mirror.

So let's go ahead and make a measurement on here to get an idea of where this box is going to be located. So it's about five and a half inches down. So I'm gonna make a mark here, and I am going to make about five and a half here. Just make a note of that. And now we can remove this, and we will have an idea of where we want to put our box.

We've made a measurement inside the mirror, and we know that the distance from the top of this liner to the screw hole for the mirror to be mounted with is two inches. So we're going to make a measurement of two inches from this spot on the wall, and that's going to be where we drill our hole can put our screw in to mount our mirror.

So we've marked the center location of the mirror, and we're going to mark our position at seven and a half inches around the mirror so we can get our product yield off and centered in the middle of the mirror.

That's going to give us, an idea of where this is going to rest. Part of this will be on this metal frame. So this may affect the heating in this particular spot slightly, but probably not over time. But just keep that in mind. That's why we're attaching it to the back of the glass to get better adhesion, better heat getting to the front of the mirror, which means better defogging.

Now I'm going to peel back two inches of this backing to get it ready to put onto the back of the mirror.

Now, we we made our two inch marking here before that's that helped us locate the electrical box, a two by three electrical box that we put in the wall was location was was predicating where we put our screw hole. So now we just need to line this up to the marks that we made, and we will get this here.

Now, if you look, we're going to have a little bit extra here. And the thing is to always remember, you can trim the adhesive backing as long as you don't get into the electrical coils. If you get into the electrical coils, you're ruining them, and your system will not work. So now that we've attached the first couple of inches, and made a good connection here. We can now lift it up and pull the adhesive backing as we attach it to the back of the mirror.

Do this nice and slowly so you don't get any air bubbles. You can eliminate the air bubbles as you go, and you should start to see the, the traces of the defogger underneath, making sure that they have a good adhesion to the back of the mirror.

And by doing it this way, you won't get any air bubbles. Air bubbles will equate to the heating elements not making good connection with the mirror itself.

Use your fingers to push out any bubbles.

Very important that you get the back of the mirror cleaned really well.

The cleaner it is, the better it will stick the better adhesion you'll get and the better defogging you'll get. So what I will do is I'll make a mark on here with a pencil to make it easier for you to see where the traces of the heating element are so you can trim around them and get rid of this excess.

So I've I've made a mark about a half an inch away from the heating elements. Because if you cut into that heating element, you'll ruin it. So now we can just peel this back. I know that my elements here I can just pull this back a little bit.

Now it's time to make our connections to the power first of all, make sure that your breaker is turned off. And once you do that, you can make your connections to the wall box.

Now, our electrical connections are made, and now it's time to hang the mirror.

That's how you install a mirror defogger to the back of a mirror. Thanks for watching.