Home Improvement Today?

Discovered a new electrical issues today, that’s always fun.

my battery in my fan remote was dying so I couldn’t get the light to turn off. I said well I’ll just turn the switch off for now, nope it didn’t work. Why on earth did the switch not turn it off? Take the switch out, test the wires….both hot. Wtf.

got in the attic and checked to make sure this wire was going to the right spot. Yep sure seems to be. So then I take the fan down, and there are 4 sets of wires coming into the junction box. All the whites are together and all the blacks are together. Oh what’s this? One white wire is with the blacks? Oh and it is 100% the white wire that is coming from the switch which is also fully disconnected at this point. So I turn the breaker off, pull the white wire out of the blacks, turn the breaker on, oh wow still hot! Wtfffffff.

I’m so confused.

 

When you say “hot” are you talking about the wires at the switch?

 

Not an electrician. One of the sets of wires going into that box is probably power coming in. Another going back to the switch. If you disconnected that white wire from the black, one of those black wires “connected to hot” is still sending power to that switch. Unless power is going to the switch first but doesn’t sound like it.

 

There is one black and one white wire at the switch. Both hot.

I have to do more tracking down…I’m just lost lol.

 

Hard to tell but something is maybe shorting out

 

The white wire you disconnected, what is the black wire connected to that is with it? It should be connected to the fan. So it would be that white wire connecting to power going back to the switch “should have black electrical tape around the ends before the connection” then from the switch, the black wire going to power on the fan.

 

I’ll try my best to explain it lol.

the junction box for the fan has 4 sets of incoming wires. All of the blacks are wire nutted together, and all of the whites are site nutted together except for 1. That white is in with the blacks.

the 2 wire that that white wire is a part of, is headed back to the switch with its corresponding black. When I disconnect the switch, meaning both the white and the black are just floating out, they’re both hot.

when I pulled the white wire that was wire nutted in with all the blacks OUT on its own, it is still hot. That white wire is hot ON BOTH ENDS when they are just “floating”

 

I’m going to guess that’s not the wire from the that junction box. The black wire on that switch, what was that connected to in the fan box?

if the black wire from the fan is wire tied together with all the other blacks then that’s your problem.

 

You’re correct the fan itself is wired wrong. For some reason it was just jumpered off into both of those wire nuts from black and white, literally didn’t have the switch in line at all.

but somehow, even with the fan disconnected, both ends of that white wire were still hot. I’m going to have to take a day and just undo all of the wires, and find the originating hot coming in.

 

I’m an idiot sorry. Thought you were confused on the wiring. You’re just asking about both ends being hot when disconnected.

 

Haha no problem, I was a bit at first because it’s obviously wrong. I’m not an electrician though, just not a complete idiot (unless we are talking about finishing drywall).

but I’m 99.9% sure that the white wires I had disconnected completely on both ends are the exact same wire, I don’t know how they could have been anything else..and was just mind blown that it was hot on both ends.

 

An idea - which may or may not apply to this situation:

You can wire a switch on a white/black wire pair.

Grab hot from fan box, run hot down white to switch, hot back to fan on black. This black ties to fan hot wire, not the hot bundle in the box.

Perhaps, that is what was wired, but somewhere, the idea was lost and all were wired together.

 

That makes sense to me, but definitely not how this was/is haha. I’ll get it figured out in the near future and report back, but I have to figure out why that switch has 2 hots when it’s disconnected..

 

I did my 1st garage door opener installation on Saturday. It wasn't too bad, the instructions were pretty good. (lots of diagrams instead of words) I had to reset the outside wireless keypad to get it to "sync" but outside of that, everything worked as it should. I did get a weird quirk- after testing a few up and down cycles to make sure that all of the remotes worked, it wouldn't open. I could hear a "click" but no movement or anything at all. I noticed a red LED on the power unit, a glance through the instructions had a troubleshooting chart, it said that the red LED indicated a thermal overload. After a short time the LED went green and it worked again. The trouble shooting chart was suggesting that the safety sensors could be out of alignment but offered no instructions on how to align them. I was thinking that I may have had the "close" position a wee bit too tight, so I reset the down limit and tried it a few times. It seemed to work at that time. Who knows, I will hear about it if it does it again.

 

is there a second on off switch? like one on this side of the room and one on the other? that may explain it

 

Nope. Just the one switch. There’s an outlet a few feet below it, with 2 sets of wires going to/coming out of it, but that’s it. So in the attic you see 3 wires coming out, but when I flip the breaker for the overhead stuff only one goes dead so I know which it is easily.

 

So parents' dishwasher was tipping out do to the wood being torn up from to many removal and replacement cycles (flooring issue)
2 mending plates and 8 #8-1/2" screws later (1 pate and 4 screws per side)

 

How are you measuring the white being hot?

Non contact voltage detector? Or volt meter?

 

Voltage detector.