*
Sean,
Thanks, man! It’s been a tough week (whoa, and it’s only Wednesday)and the vision of you at the switch box brought back visions of Larry, Moe, and Curly…
But on to your problem,
Do any of the switches have three terminals (two brass and one black)? Those are three-ways. So do a net search on “three way switch” or “switch wiring” and you’ll find several very nice diagrams on wiring those puppies.
You’ll need a simple electrical tester to check continuity so that you can get things right. Better yet, get a friend who has one and knows how to use it safely to help you out.
One other thought…are you sure that the kitchen and bathroom outlets are not GFI-protected? It’s pretty common to install one GFI in one bath and feed through it to protect other bath outlets. The protected outlets are required by code to be labelled as such, but they might not be. Same for kitchen. There’s a cheap outlet tester that will trip a GFI. Get one and check those outlets. And then use the tester to check all the outlets in the house (and exterior, which also have to be GFI-protected), to see that they’re properly wired.
If any of the kitched counter or the bath outlets are not GFI-protected, I’d call the builder and ask him to fix it–have another electrician (not smart-ass) come out and take care of it, or you will, and you’ll send him the bill. If he doesn’t take care of it within a week, you could also tell the builder that you’ll be talking to the BBB, C of C, Contractor’s Licensing Board, & building inspector about the unsafe situation that he failed to detect, and didn’t fix once it was brought to his attention…
Good luck.
Replies
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Sean,
Glad to hear that your immediate problems are taken care of (and you still have a pulse).
The non-contact (capacitive coupling) voltage testers mentioned are great. Get the Fluke or Greenlee that uses 2 AAA batteries. Others (like Gardner-Bender) use two button cells (watch batteries) that are less easy to get, and don't last as long as the AAAs.
ALWAYS remember to test your tester before staking your life on it.
As far as tracing wires in the walls, I have to ask, WHY?
If you want to know where a specific wire begins and ends, you turn off all power, open the adjacent boxes, open the hots (black wires), and use a simple continuity tester to establish where wires go. It's tedious, and sometimes frustrating (if the logic of the electrician who did the rough-in is very different than yours), but it works. Once you know where a wire begins and ends, it's pretty easy to visualize how it gets between those points. If you're worried about hitting a romex run with a screw or nail, buy one of Zircon's fancy stud finders (about $40) that also reliably detects voltage in romex.
My experience is that a pen-style non-contact voltage detector will not pick up the EMF from a wire in the wall--usually not through drywall (unless the cable is WAY too close to the rock), and never through plaster. The cheapest good toner/tracer is made by Ideal and runs about $225. It takes practice to get reliable results with it.
The "breaker tracer" units are good for just that, but two people (or one and a radio plugged into the circuit) do just fine at doping out which breaker controls which circuit.
Sean, spend your money on a good health plan (and maybe you own automatic external defibrillator, if you're going to continue to mess with electricity...)
No, really, get the Time-Life book on home electrical, or the Ortho book, and good luck. Ask away here--always ready to help someone who is ready to learn.
*
Sparks?
You must be refering to the $1.00 circuit tester, the cheap screwdriver one uses to touch between the wire in question and a good ground. If there is a shower of sparks, the circuit was live. If you held the screwdriver in really good contact with the wire and ground, it should no longer be live, as the breaker should trip, or the fuse blow. Screwdriver does get shorter, and needs to be replaced occasionally.Industrial electricians use this tester a lot, as it is asier to fined the tripped breaker than try flipping 100 breakers to find which one controls the circuit. I DO NOT recomend this, I am just reporting what I have observed in the field.Please Do remember warnings of flash burn to the eyes and sparks cause fires... And I remember talk of the shortened screwdriver that resulted from a circuit that never did trip! I hope they were wearing a #11 arc welding shield.
The field type tester is a great tool.
Work safely!
Frank
*I wondered why your fingers were so stubby!Sparks? I was referring to the divot in my brand-new wire strippers!Note that there is no safe way to test whether a circuit breaker works! I guess you could carry around an appropriately-sized resistive load, but does anyone ever do it? Breakers fail just like anything else ... I guess you identify and replace the bad one after the house burns down. I'm one of those lucky split-bus people with no master breaker, although with my installation of subpanels for lack of space, most circuits now pass through two breakers.
*You already own a cheap one-person circuit tracer...I used our FM baby monitor, plugged into the mystery circuit. The receiver goes to static when you hit the right switch. A plug adapter for non receptacle circuits and you're in business. No monitor? Plug in a radio or TV and crank the volume so you can hear it back at the breaker box.BTW, if you doubted electricians have a sense of humor, just look at how they deliberately mislabel the circuits, if they label them at all. Trivia: the labels are Code-required.
*A simple way to do it relatively safely is with an ordinary wall switch. Put it in a plastic box, and let the two wires hang out of the box. Or just attach the wires and wrap the heck out of the switch with tape. Complete the circuit with your wires and flip the switch. No more pitted screwdrivers or burnt fingers. Go flip the breaker back on when yer done working.
*Yes, but what if the breaker does NOT trip? How do you flick off the red-hot switch before the in-wall wires turn the house into a griddle?
*OUCH !!A good argument for having the switch in a box. Easier to just hit the switch off that way. I suppose the switch could fuse closed real quick, so you'd have to make sure that at least one of your wire connections could be pulled loose easily and quickly.
*Well, you could make this switch box overly complicated and include a selection of different sized circuit breakers in series with the high capacity switch. Just select one the next higher rating than the circuit under test and it may offer some degree of saftey over no overcurrent protection, while still allowing the breaker under test to trip first. Yes, this is getting way too complicated. How about a selection of fuses and an old fuse style saftey switch ( call them disconnects today). Nice big handle to operate, but the expense of fuses every time you use it. I can't recall seeing a fuse not work under shorted conditions. Need an inexpensive load tester? get several old irons that still work. About 1000 watts per iron.Just do not plug all three irons into the same 18ga tripple tap extension cord. Yes, I have seen this done at my high school prom. When the cord melted in two, the breaker stopped tripping. Frank
*Or your fancy, oversized, never gonna use it, testing box could have slo-blo circuit breakers that they use for motor loads. That way, you can test the circuit at it's rated ampacity instead of the next higher. An LED display to let you know what's going on would be nice too.
*ROFLOLWell heck, why don't we throw in a meter as well so we can know how much the electric company is going to charge us for our little test.: )Of course, this presents the problem of having to go to the P.U.D and have them reseal the blamed thing every time you take your box apart to replace parts....heheheOH OH OH !!! Aaaaand... we could wire in a little tv so's we could watch the game, er um, I mean, some pertinent public telly program, while we wait for the circuit to break.
*Again, thanks to all.Believe it or not, I really do know better. I was a stage technician previously in life, including lighting tech. I ordinarily am extremely cautious around electricity, as there is no force of nature I fear and respect more. However, I believe I just got complacent. My current home is a mixture of knob & tube, BX, and Romex. I do (just about) all of my own repairs, with additional safety factors whenever possible. I made the near fatal mistake of assumption. I assumed that since my mother-in-law's house is new construction, everything would be more or less as it should be. I figured that whatever mistakes were in the wiring were honest mistakes, and the electrician didn't want the blame for making them.I spoke to my mother-in-law earlier today. She said that the electrician kept demanding payment to do the rework on this circuit, and only further threats both to his license and from the general contractor prompted him to complete the work. As it turns out, he intentionally wired the circuit wrong. He did this with the intent that he would get called back, and be able to charge additional for work that didn't need to be done. Tomorrow we start calling the appropriate authorities about his business practices.As for my needs for the wire tracer, I was doing a remodel of one room in my house. I was eliminating a circuit and running a new one in its place. One wire in particular was causing problems in tracking, and I was hoping to be able to trace it to its source. I then planned to abandon that wire. Instead, after punching a few holes in the ceiling of the room below, I did not want to replace the entire ceiling so I used that wire to install a ceiling fixture. (After ensuring the rest of the circuit, in conjuntion with a ceiling light/fan, would not overload the circuit.) I feel that a wire trace would have enabled me to pinpoint which outlet the wire was coming from, so that I could have followed my original plan to simply abandon the run, and not have to patch yet another ceiling. I'm just glad I was planning on painting that other room anyway.Further, I will be buying a new house at the end of the month, which will also require some wiring. I intend to do much of this work myself, and I think this tool would be beneficial. Not to mention these boards, as I am sure many more questions are to come.Sean
*
Sean,
Check out the Ideal Industries website...
http://www.idealindustries.com
Look for the "Wire Hunter". It works.
Also, there's a great site with products for wire running (more alarm & telcom than electrical, but very useful anyway)...
http://www.mccartenco.com
And, lastly, there is a great book on old work:
"Old Electrical Wiring" by Shapiro, published recently by McGraw-Hill. Contains fantastic advice on troubleshooting.
Good luck.
*
Really, an integrated graphing oscilloscope would be the way to
go, so you can study the voltage sag to determine whether the
circuit
resistance is within design parameters. You might have to
replace the inwall wiring after the test, but what price safety?
Geez, carpenters are always trying to cut corners, eh?
I vote for bridging the wires with a slo-blo fuse, which a
29¢ switch would probably do for you anyway. Especially if
you backwire!
*Wow, all good info but howz about turning off the electricity first. Then get yourself a hot wire tester,(responds without direct contact.)
*
My mother-in-law's house has a 3 way light fixture that doesn't turn off. It's new construction, and when the house was built, the electrician and/or builder only ran wires to ceiling boxes with plain covers - fixtures themselves would have been extra, without being the style wanted. (It's only a SEMI-custom development) So, when my m-i-l put up the light she wanted (wired correctly, black to black, white to white, etc.), it wouldn't turn off, apparently because the switches were wired incorrectly. She called back the electrician who wired the house, under the one year home warranty. Heh heh. He said, "I didn't put that light in, so it's not my problem." (A few choice words for the electrician deleted.)
The circuit has power coming into box A (1 switch), leading to box B (2 switches), leading the ceiling box. According to the jerk electrician, the 2 switches in box B are one for a fan and one for a light within the same ceiling box. Sure enough, the ceiling box does have a 3 wire (plus ground) feed.
The fun I had, though, was after I turned off the breaker, I pulled out the switches to see how they were wired. ZAP! One of the switches is powered by a seperate circuit. After the one shock, I let go of the switch and the play in the wires caused it to spring over to the other switch. Because the switches are backwired the screws are still in the out or up position. One screw hooked the ground wire for the other switch, and so when I seperated the switches I got shocked again. I love when I need to learn my lessons twice.
The second switch (other circuit) is not known. We checked every outlet in the vicinity, and they are not switched. Additionally, there are no other lights around that are controlled by that switch. However, I did not think to check the red wire in the ceiling to see if that is powered by that switch.
My basic questions are:
1. I know how a 'normal' 3 way switch is/should be wired. Does anyone have a diagram for wiring from a single switch to two switches, for light and fan? (Just in case the electrician isn't crazy.)
2. Is there a relatively common wiring mistake I should look for that would cause the light to stay on?
3. Is it possible that the ceiling fan is still controlled by that other switch, even while that is a seperate circuit?
4. Is there an inexpensive tool that will allow me to trace the wires to see exactly what is going where?
5. What recourse is there against an electrician who doesn't wire properly? This is not the only example - he didn't put GFCIs in the kitchen or two of the three baths.
I should have noted exactly which wires go where, but I don't recall at this time. I do remember that the first switch (box A) looked correct, and that the problems probably start at box B. If you like, I'll repost with that information. Thanks for any advice you can give, and letting me vent.
Sean
*(1) get an AC voltage sensor, about $10!(2) not sure what your description means. If box B controls TWO circuits, as you, um, discovered, there should USUALLY be separate pairs of cables for each one (black-white-ground), one entering the box and one exiting -- that is, the neutral should NOT be shared ... UNLESS (!) the hots are on opposite legs of the service feed, which would give you 240 volts between them (are the breakers adjacent or across from each other?). Usually a 3-wire supply is used in this arrangement -- red-black-white-ground (ground doesn't count as a wire...) -- it saves a whole wire, and improves the chances of electrocuting curious homeowners or subjecting as unsuspecting appliance to 240V if the neutral fails.Typically, there would be a 3-wire cable exiting the switch box to the ceiling box, red being hot for one device, black for the other; for two circuits there have to be two neutrals as well, unless as I said the hots are on opposite legs.Q's:• Are both switch A & B 3-way? (3 terminals each) If not, the circuit can not be 3-way ...• You say the circuit "passes through" box A -- is A a passivefeedthrough, or does the switch control whether current passes to box B? If the former, it is not a 3-way. If the latter, it may be 3-way only if unless there are two alternative hots connected to the switch's out terminals and exiting the box... The switch's common gets connected to the supply hot.Well, so much for chatter. Just check whether the black and red in the ceiling box are controlled by ANY switches, and by which ones. Obviously the black you used for the lamp is always hot, meaning that: (a) it was mistakenly not connected to a switch; (b) you have not found the right switch; (c) the circuit or switches were miswired (easy to do); (d) the black was MEANT to be always hot, the fan controlled by a pull chain or some such. Ignore the red, capping it securely with a wire nut ... or if you find that you can control the red but not the black, connect red to the light and cap the black....(3) If something IS wrong, complain to the builder. It is his responsibility to deal with his subs and employees. And don't poke around with wires without extreme caution!!! The shocks were polite warnings ... yeah, I've gotten them too ... but some people die with the first shock. I'd consider having another electrician evaluate it for you, and if it's wrong charging the builder ... but read the terms of your warranty first.
*Mr. Pita,
View Image © 1999-2000"The first step towards vice is to shroud innocent actions in mystery, and whoever likes to conceal something sooner or later has reason to conceal it." Aristotle
*Mr. Pita,
View Image © 1999-2000"The first step towards vice is to shroud innocent actions in mystery, and whoever likes to conceal something sooner or later has reason to conceal it." Aristotle
*Sean,Thanks, man! It's been a tough week (whoa, and it's only Wednesday)and the vision of you at the switch box brought back visions of Larry, Moe, and Curly...But on to your problem, Do any of the switches have three terminals (two brass and one black)? Those are three-ways. So do a net search on "three way switch" or "switch wiring" and you'll find several very nice diagrams on wiring those puppies.You'll need a simple electrical tester to check continuity so that you can get things right. Better yet, get a friend who has one and knows how to use it safely to help you out. One other thought...are you sure that the kitchen and bathroom outlets are not GFI-protected? It's pretty common to install one GFI in one bath and feed through it to protect other bath outlets. The protected outlets are required by code to be labelled as such, but they might not be. Same for kitchen. There's a cheap outlet tester that will trip a GFI. Get one and check those outlets. And then use the tester to check all the outlets in the house (and exterior, which also have to be GFI-protected), to see that they're properly wired.If any of the kitched counter or the bath outlets are not GFI-protected, I'd call the builder and ask him to fix it--have another electrician (not smart-ass) come out and take care of it, or you will, and you'll send him the bill. If he doesn't take care of it within a week, you could also tell the builder that you'll be talking to the BBB, C of C, Contractor's Licensing Board, & building inspector about the unsafe situation that he failed to detect, and didn't fix once it was brought to his attention...Good luck.
*Argh!! gfCi ... good luck Sean
*Thank you to all who replied. Andrew D was right, the fan was meant to be on all the time, but the red wire was being controlled, not the black. As for the other switch in that one box, it controlled a different light circuit altogether. That circuit was another ceiling box without a fixture that we kind of 'forgot' was there in the other room. The GFCIs had not been installed. There have been other problems throughout the house, and the builder has taken too avoiding Nancy (my mother-in-law). After she tracked him down, he realized this was a way to make her a little happier and not something he would have to do. So, after he leaned on the electrician, the electrician came out and figured out what was wrong with our ceiling light, and installed the GFCIs as they should be.Oh, and Andrew D - I did have a $10 voltage tester. After getting shocked and collecting myself, I tested them to see which switch still had power. Somehow I managed to melt one of the test leads - there's a nice notch in it now, goes more than 1/2 way through the pin. Time to buy a new one...As for one of my other questions, I was looking for an inexpensive circuit tracer. I know Greenlee makes a couple, models 2007, 2008, 2011. I saw these on the Grainger site for prices from $350 - $450. While these would do what I want, they are WAY out my price league, (as you've probably seen/figured, I'm a DIY) and they have a ton of bells and whistles I don't necessarily want or need. So, does anyone know of a much cheaper version? I have seen the breaker finder version where you plug something in an outlet, and then go to the breaker panel and hold the tool against each breaker - it'll buzz/whistle/whatever when you find the correct breaker. However, I would like to find something that also can trace the wire's path in the walls. The $$$$ version can do it, the $ version doesn't look like it'll handle it. So, any $$ or even $$$ versions available?Thanks again guys, and I'll make an effort to be less verbose... I hate long posts, myself.Sean
*Andrew:We older folks remember when they first appeared on the market, they were Ground Fault Interrupters. Sometime later the mysterious Circuit appeared. Heck, I remember the pictures in Popular Science of the inventor showing how the device worked using his own hands between a hot wire and a cold water pipe! Talk about confidence in your invention...Frank
*I don't know ... I think the "Circuit" was a correction! The GFCI doesn't remedy the ground fault, but turns off the power ... just as a circuit breaker isn't called a "shorted wire fixer."OK, picky grammar. It's a dirty job, but....
*Don't feel too bad, even certified electrician Frank DuVal shoots sparks sometimes. Frank?Get one of the FIELD sensors ... I forget what they're actually called ... but they sense the AC without electrical contact, you just place the pencil-sized device near the wire and an LED lights or doesn't. They aren't foolproof because they are very sensitive to stray fields, but the more grave defect of the neon tester is that it's easy to fail to get a good contact on an old corroded terminal screw without gooey electrical tape stickum on it and assume the circuit's dead -- plus the problem you noted (at least the current didn't go through your finger). In short (no pun), the field sensor errs towards false positives, the neon towards false negatives.Glad I guessed your situation right! (Of course, I made many guesses ... that's what lawyers do, throw it all up and see what sticks.)