Hey all. No stranger to electronics, I've been building simple circuits as a kid and these days I build computers. I have a kitchen fan with light fixture that the light is wired to 3 way switches on either side of the kitchen. I was going to replace one of the switches with a dimmer switch. I rarly involved myself with household electrical so I do what I always do and hit up some youtube electrician videos and learned about the wiring configurations I should expect for this setup so when I pulled out the switch I would not be surprised.
So when I pulled the switch I was going to swap out I saw what I saw in the image attached, MINUS the black tape (more on that later). I was all great, the white is obviously my common and the 2 red are the tracers so this should be super simple. I wired in the new switch and when I powered up I found that the switch I didn't touch worked as normal, but the replaced switch became a dead mans switch (one position allows the 2nd switch to work, other position means the light is off no matter what).
This was a real head scratcher so I pulled out the second switch only to be greeted by an unexpected wiring setup. The 2nd switch had a black wire on common, a WHITE wire on one of the tracers, and a red wire on the other tracer. So there was only one red wire in the box. So after wondering how the hell am I supposed to figure these wires out I started tying the red and white wires together on one side to identify a loop. Indeed I did identify the one red wire and the white wire in box 2 led back to the first box of the same color. I proceeded to mark the red wire that was not going to both boxes with the black tape, suspecting it should be the common wire. However despite knowing that, I couldn't find any combination of running the black/red on common to work. ALSO, after wiring the OLD switch back in I am still stuck with a deadman setup. Switch 1 just tells switch 2 if it is allowed to turn on the light. I would like to say I am wired up exactly the same but in switch 1 I had two red wires that I did not mark separate, and in switch 2 I did pull the white and red tracer wires so I could test them on the volt meter and so it is possible I swapped these two wires on the T1 and T2 terminals.
Also I was able to identify that 120v was coming in on the first switch but alas I failed to document if it was the white or red wire. That said I detected nothing on the other side so it may be the red/black through process of elimination. So in the end I am trying to figure out the wiring diagram of this light setup, why and how it originally worked, and if I can/should attempt to re wire both sides with how I saw in the youtube videos. The youtube videos showed many different setups but one thing stayed the same, tracers went to tracers and the common connection would be a serial break in the loop to the light, one switch was hot and one switch would hand off to the light fixture.
So when I pulled the switch I was going to swap out I saw what I saw in the image attached, MINUS the black tape (more on that later). I was all great, the white is obviously my common and the 2 red are the tracers so this should be super simple. I wired in the new switch and when I powered up I found that the switch I didn't touch worked as normal, but the replaced switch became a dead mans switch (one position allows the 2nd switch to work, other position means the light is off no matter what).
This was a real head scratcher so I pulled out the second switch only to be greeted by an unexpected wiring setup. The 2nd switch had a black wire on common, a WHITE wire on one of the tracers, and a red wire on the other tracer. So there was only one red wire in the box. So after wondering how the hell am I supposed to figure these wires out I started tying the red and white wires together on one side to identify a loop. Indeed I did identify the one red wire and the white wire in box 2 led back to the first box of the same color. I proceeded to mark the red wire that was not going to both boxes with the black tape, suspecting it should be the common wire. However despite knowing that, I couldn't find any combination of running the black/red on common to work. ALSO, after wiring the OLD switch back in I am still stuck with a deadman setup. Switch 1 just tells switch 2 if it is allowed to turn on the light. I would like to say I am wired up exactly the same but in switch 1 I had two red wires that I did not mark separate, and in switch 2 I did pull the white and red tracer wires so I could test them on the volt meter and so it is possible I swapped these two wires on the T1 and T2 terminals.
Also I was able to identify that 120v was coming in on the first switch but alas I failed to document if it was the white or red wire. That said I detected nothing on the other side so it may be the red/black through process of elimination. So in the end I am trying to figure out the wiring diagram of this light setup, why and how it originally worked, and if I can/should attempt to re wire both sides with how I saw in the youtube videos. The youtube videos showed many different setups but one thing stayed the same, tracers went to tracers and the common connection would be a serial break in the loop to the light, one switch was hot and one switch would hand off to the light fixture.
![[ElectriciansForums.net] Swapping out 3 way switch with dimmer, wiring mess found.](https://electricians.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/data/attachments/57/57079-50c70322e8f73ce542b70afce19bcd4e.jpg)
