Since we're talking about home repair.. (electrical)

[mrCide]

I'm in a town home that's about 4 years old, 2 story 2 bedrooms upstairs and a 'great' room downstairs. I have a couple issues with wall switches. In the master bedroom I have an outlet switch and a secondary switch that's supposed to be for the fan/light fixture. This switch does nothing. I have wired a fan with a light fixture that works just fine, but again, switch doesn't power it off if it's on.

Between the 2 upstairs bedrooms is a small "hall" i don't know what to call it, where there's a closet for washer/dryer and the closet with the a/c unit. Other side of this hall has straight stairs that lead down. Where the stair starts, there's a switch (for the stair/hall light fixture), and an outlet below it which is at the top of the stairs. For some reason, this switch also powers on the outlet just underneath it (what point is there to this?). Note that all the switches in the house that go to an outlet were marked except this one..

Second bedroom fan/light switch and outlet switch work fine.

Lastly, downstairs in the great room there is a 3 switch panel. One for an outlet (works), one for the dining light fixture (works), and another one that's supposed to be for the fan/light fixture above the "great" room, this does not work. Again, the fan/light there works fine, just not with the switch.

Knowing that I'm not an electrician, how hard would it be to fix these 3 switch fuck-ups? Would it be a cheap job for an electrician to correct?

 

[edro]

The fans depend on if the original electrician ran extra wire to control the fan circuit, separately from the light.
If there isn't an extra wire from the switch to the fan, the new guy will have to pull a new wire, which is a lot harder, depending on access.

Look up ceiling fan wiring diagrams on Google.

 

[PsiStar]

I'll ask the question that has to be asked & not intended to be insulting.

When the fan/light is on, does the switch turn it off?

If no, then check out the fan/light remote controls that HomeDepot & Lowes both have. They *usually* work great, but occasionally the power line can be noisy & the lights will turn on randomly. Note; I said *on* and never off. These would save having to fish wire and there is the possibility that you could wire them in yourself ... or find some local handy man as they are pretty straight forward.

 

[DrPizza]

My best guess:
In the electrical box above your ceiling fan, you have two choices to connect the black and blue wires from your ceiling fan to.

I attempted about 3 times to try to explain it and had to keep deleting paragraphs. Simply there are 3 or 4 different cases. It's easy to recognize which case you have once you look inside the electrical box in the ceiling. But, it may even be quicker to look inside the electrical box that the switch is in. I'm just going to cover the simplest case: If you remove the switch cover, you might see only one cable enters that electrical box. You may need to loosen the screws on the switch and pull it out a little bit. (Turn the power off via breaker box, and be very careful, since you don't know 100% for certain if that's what this switch goes to.) If there is only one cable that enters the box - a black, white, and bare copper wire from it, and the black and white wire are both connected to the switch, you're in luck. (Because this is the case I'm going to explain.) The white wire may have black electrical tape wrapped around it for a couple of inches. This simply denotes that it's used as a hot wire & not a neutral wire.

If that's the case, then in the electrical box in the ceiling, you have two choices for power. From your ceiling fan, there will be 4 wires: black, white, blue, and ground (bare copper, else green). The blue is to provide power to the lights, the black is to provide power to the fan, the white is the neutral, and the other is the ground.

What you'll probably find is that the black and blue wires are both connected together with a 3rd wire and 4th wire. One of those wires that those two wires are connected is providing the power to the circuit 100% of the time, regardless of the position of the switch. The other is connected to one side of the switch. I suspect that if you look, you'll also find a wire that's all by itself in there with a wire nut over it & no other wire connected to it. This is the return wire from the switch.

You can use a cheap $3 electric tester to see if this wire is live when the switch is turned on & dead when the switch is turned off. Be very careful, since this would require the breaker to be on while you're testing. If this is the case, then you'll simply want to disconnect the aforementioned 4 wires, and remove the blue from that group. Reconnect the other three. Connect the blue wire to this wire that's live when the switch is on.

Typing these couple of paragraphs took longer than it would take me to fix the problem for you; it's pretty simple to do. There are a couple of other circuit possibilities, such as if the power goes to the electrical box behind the switch first, then from there to the ceiling box. Or, if the circuit is branched off from the ceiling box, in which case there simply will be one more white, black, and bare copper wire present.

Good luck. If you post pictures of what's inside the switch box, and what's in the ceiling box above the fan, someone here can probably provide more specific assistance.

 

[mrCide]

Definitely thanks for the responses, particularly DrPizza. When I got home I realized With one fan working and the other 2 not, I probably screwed up. I actually did install these fans myself. You are correct there were 4 wires. Red ground black white. My fan had black black/white strip white and ground. I linked the black/white one (which was just wired in addition to the black fan one to the electric box black wire) so I wired it to the red and the switch was working after that. Stupid me. I'll have to do the same with the one downstairs.

Don't know why it didn't occur to me when I first installed the fans, I think I just assumed the switch was meant for both the fan and the light together, not just the light.

As PsiStar mentioned though because the red (switch) wire wasn't wired to anything it had no affect..

Now if i can figure out the hall switch/wall socket purpose I'll be set..