Rewiring...

[lsanderson]

At one point, when I put up the run of salvage track lighting up in the kitchen it worked fine with a fluorescent light each on it's own switch. At some point, a certain Asian fixed them, and instead of two switches controlling two different light systems, there's been two switches controlling the lights. I'm trying to separate them again, and it's proving much more complicated than I imagined. My simple plan A got the fluorescent back on the switch, but oddly enough the tracks won't light. Being such a wizard of wiring, this shouts out: "Something's not right." Of course, my usual hint that something's not right is when I throw the circuit breaker and it goes off immediately.

Comments

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

Going from a three-way back to separate? I'm not sure I understood the description of the recent starting point accurately.

The books give two ways of wiring three-way switches, the way I learned in grade school and another strange one, which I've found actually used in professional wiring; if you were expecting the simple one, that may be what's confusing things. (The alternative way doesn't work with X-10 three-way switches, so I had to convert it to the normal wiring for three-ways).

Perhaps the Asian in question could be compelled to explain what he'd done?

A stab in the dark

[mle292.livejournal.com]

I'm guessing without actually seeing it. I am assuming that nothing in the box with the light fixture has been changed or been opened since it's been modified.

I think that a jumper wire probably got removed in the last modification. You might need to take two short pieces of wire and connect them with a wire nut to one hot so that you'll have two hot wires, one for the "in" of each switch.

Again, I haven't actually seen it, so I'm guessing.

If this doesn't fit what you've got, describe how many wires are in all of the boxes that have been opened, if they're in a cable with other wires and how many total are in that cable ("one cable with a black, white and red from the top, two cables with a black and white each from the bottom" is good). If you can't tell what color the wires used to be, don't worry about it, just give as much information as you can.