I’m stuck on an electrical problem at home. It started when I got the bright idea to change a regular light switch in the hallway to a motion sensor. I’ve done this kind of minor work before with no problem, but this went south.
The light switch in question is a 3-way switch, with the other switch in a room around the corner. They both control the two overhead lights in the hallway.
When I removed the old switch in the hallway, there were two black wires and one red wire coming from the wall, plus the bare ground wire. I installed the new motion sensor switch and when I turned the power back on the switch worked – very briefly.
When I touched it to put it back in the wall, the lights turned off. I couldn’t get the new switch to work again, and I wasn’t entirely sure how the sensor wires were supposed to match up with the wall wires. After trying every combination possible, I gave up and just wanted to put the old switch back in and be done with it.
I installed the old switch but it doesn’t work either. And… the overhead lights in two nearby storage rooms and the room next to the hall (where the second 3-way switch for the hall is located) don’t work. The storage room lights are not controlled by the two switches in question; they each have their own light switch.
I’m on the verge of calling an electrician to fix my mess, but I’d like to avoid the expense if anyone has advice on what’s going on.
I had turned off the main breaker, killing power to the whole house. During the troubleshooting, I did double check to see that no individual breaker had flipped.
There’s no GFI with these switches. I don’t know what an arc fault is.
3 ways switches can be kind of tricky. Is one of the black wires that goes to the switch pigtailed off of two or three other black wires wire nutted together? If so, make sure the breaker is off, then remove that wire nut to make sure you don’t have a broken wire in there. Copper bus wire breaks pretty easily. You could have broke it when you pulled the wire out to hook up the switch. I think you’re problem is going to be in that connection since you don’t have power in the other rooms you were talking about. If that doesn’t take care of it check the white wires under the other wire nut. I know you didn’t mess with them but moving stuff around in the box could have broke one of those off also.
Don’t forget to throw the breaker before working on your home electrical.
Okay, I checked the pigtail and the connection was fine. So I went back to the breaker box and checked for the umpteenth time. This time I noticed that one of the switches was not all the way “flipped” in the off position. It was leaning more toward the on position but not quite there, a bit loosey goosey when I jiggled it.
So I pushed it all the way to on, and that fixed the problem.
Thanks, guys. That would have been embarrassing if I had an electrician come out.
Just to be 100% explicit for our electrically clueless OP …
When a breaker “trips” and the power is cut off, the switch handle moves from fully on to a position that looks about 80% on. To reset it you flip it fully off, then back to fully on.
When I reset a breaker I make sure to flip it to on & let my finger slide off it immediately. That way if the problem is still present I won’t be holding it in the on position for more than a moment.
Another potentially silly question: Since it was a three-way switch you were replacing, did you buy and install a 3-way motion sensor switch? If not you’re going to have more problems.
As you noticed, a “3-way” switch uses 3 wires for hot.
There is no way to wire a SPST (on-off) switch in place of a 3-way and preserve the function.
The wiring diagram for a 3-way is on its box, and should also be molded into the back of the switch.
Briefly:
--------------------------------
line in --- (sw) (sw)------ to lamp
--------------------------------
The switch with the current coming in is feeding one of the 2 lines between the switches. The switch with the wire going to the lamp(s) is feeding from one or the other of those 2 lines.
Flipping one either puts the current into the wire not connected or connects the lamp to a dead wire.
There are special dimmers for 3-way applications; there should also be motion sensors for them.
That indicates another problem – that you don’t have a detailed list on the breaker box showing which breaker controls which circuits ('cause then you would have just turned off that relevant breaker. Also, you would have found this problem sooner, because instead of glancing at all the breakers, you would have looked closely at this specific one.
So, some day, take the time to make up a complete, accurate list of your breakers. It’ll come in handy.
Get another person to help you. One of you stays by the breaker box to switch them on & off and make notes, while the other goes around to test out lights & outlets. A pair of walkie-talkies or cell phones is helpful.
I suggest that people forget the small chart on their breaker box – probably filled in already (often no longer correct) and too small to include everything. Instead make this list in a computer word-processing program, and save it for future updating. Print it out in a large font, easy to read by flashlight. Also, it’s handy to print 2 versions of this: one sorted in breaker number order, the other sorted description/room order.