I suppose you could have had a GFCI outlet trip that you haven't reset. Possible?

If you had arcing, you obviously did not identify the wires correctly the first time. No reason to think you got them right the second time w/ the basic switches either. Black is never a ground; only green or bare. You need to do some basic wire tracing to determine which wire is which. If you do not know how to do this, hire a pro.

Also, by your description of non-working outlets and their associated rooms, it doesn't sound like things are wired as they should be (bathroom outlet shouldn't be on the same circuit as another room) on any version of NEC code for quite some time...

buzzsaw

Could you define 'quite some time , please' approximately. 10yrs, 30yrs, ??

None of the outlets have a switch to test and reset. They are just normal outlets.

Like I said before, when we looked where the wall switch is there were 3 black wires. Two of them have a white tape wrapped around them further up in the wall and one of them doesn't. We assumed the one without tape was the ground. We forgot to label the wires originally and were doing the connection from what we remembered.

Also when we originally cut power, the power in the master bedroom and the power to the computer room (right next to master) went out on the same switch. The two bathrooms still had power.

This is a very strange situation. Do you think we should get an electrician in to check it out? Approximately how much are we looking at?

Is this a fairly old house? Say, 1940s vintage or earlier?

Alison,

Depending on the age of the house, GFCI's can show up in the strangest places. I owned a house were the GFCI for the two bathrooms was in the garage.

Since you have three black wires I'm assuming you have metal conduit. In that case the conduit is the ground. I think that one of the black wires brings power into the switch and the other two (one for a light the other for the fan) take it back to the fan box? Probably the two taped together. I'd use different colored wires just to make things easier but I don't think it's required.

If you're in over your head it might make good sense to hire a licensed electrician to fix things for you.

Mike

The house was built in 1979. So it is not what you would call vintage. We have been in house almost 4 years now and the longer we live here, more things are coming up that show just how crappy some of the work was done.

For example, when we got a new dryer - parts of the vent pipe in the attic was falling apart. Instead of having a smaller pipe fit inside the larger one and duct taped, the two pipes were the same size. The larger one was snipped around the edges and flared out. Then the smaller one was jammed as far as it would go and connected with one screw through a flange. It wasn't even duct taped.

So it wouldn't surprise me if there was something screwy with the electrical system too.

Myself, I did not recall the exact date of GFCI use in baths, but this article mentions the 1975 NEC code.

What type of wire do do you have? Neutrals - at least by recent standards - cannot be re-labeled black wires which sounds like that is what was done. Do you have metal boxes? It all seems like a mess...

Here is a link that might be useful: GFCI Intro to Baths

Yes, the boxes are metal. The black wires have a solid copper core. There are also 3 white wires that have a plastic connector holding them together. There are 3 copper wires that have no insulation around them.

You've gone from having just three black wires to having three black wires, three white wires and three bare wires. Which is it?

Where did you see the arcing?

My guess: The bare wires are the grounds. The whites are the neutrals. Two of the blacks are power in/out, the other black is the power to the light. Try connecting the two black wires with the tape on them together and see if the power is restored to the non-working receptacles. If so, then jumper from these two to one screw of the switch, connect the remaining black wire to the other screw and all should be well.

Turn on the switch and test all the dead receptacles etc.
Please describe this arcing that you had with fan controller.
It is likely you either have something connected wrong or a loose connection. If it all worked before you made adjustments then the problem is likely in either the switch box or the fan box.
Even though you didn't mess with the white wires, check that connection alng with all the other connections..

Sorry didn't mean to be confusing. I didn't mention the white wires and the bare copper wires before because they were not connected to anything when we started this project. I just mentioned it as an after thought because they were also in the same box.

The arcing occured after we connected the dual switch and moved the levers. Whenever we moved a lever (both the fan and the light) from the off position to an on position there was arcing inside the dual switch box.

There was no arcing once we reconnected the old single switch. When we tested the fan and light with this original switch (before we removed it and put on the dual switch) we also had no arcing.

The outlets were working up until we put on the dual switch. Is it possible that it shorted out all the outlets mentioned? We thought this was strange.

there was arcing inside the dual switch box.

Do you mean a little blue spark, or a huge, bright flash?

It sounds like you disconnected or loosened a connection in the box when you were trying to install the switch. This might be a good time to contact a pro for help.

It was just small blue sparking when we moved the levers on the dual switch. Once we reconnected the original toggle switch, there was no more sparking but the outlets didn't work.

Allison,

I'm brand new on this forum but there are some basic information you need to understand about wiring. One is that all switches carry load only. Load is carried on 'Black' wires. Typically, the source wire will come in through the bottom of the switch and leave to the load on the top of the switch. Since the easiest type of wire is usually 14/2 Roam ex, Most people that are installing a switch use the 2 wire (black & white) wires from the switch to the load. This requires that you mark the white wire with small bands of black tape to indicate that this is a load bearing lead, not a return wire.

Were I you, I would suggest that you take a meter or a signal generator place it on the black wire coming out of the hole in the ceiling and after verifying that the circuit is dead, with a meter. Jumper the black wire to the conduit ground in the ceiling. With a meter now set on OHMs x1K measure between the conduit at the box and each black wire. When you see the meter drop to zero (0) Ohms, that's the wire going to the ceiling. Once you have that wire identified, use a small piece of of blue or for that matter any color electrical tape to mark the lead on both ends. WRITE DOWN AND SAVE a wiring legend as in Blue = Ceiling fan, Red = Outlets, Orange = ceiling fan light and so on. Once you have the wring 'wrung out' you can begin to actually re-wire your gang box. RULE NUMBER ONE TO FOLLOW IS: NEVER WORK on a LIVE LINE! Always test the lead for voltage then turn off the breaker for that circuit, then test it again

Oops' Allison, my mind went faster than my typing.

I left out the following:

Since 2 of the 3 black wires have white bands around them, I would hazard a guess that these are indicative of return lines and should not be pigtailed with the all black wire. I would pigtail them to another "White" wire.

Either the electrician ran out of white wire and was to lazy to get another reel or he/she only intended to use black and just band the "White" wires.

Of course, that presupposes that further down the DYI chain you would already know why the wires were banded in white.

Please let me know if the info I sent you was useful or to late because you already paid for an electrician to unscramble the omelet for you.