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Electrical Wiring

ceiling fan & switch leg

14 years ago

I'm a handyman. One year ago I installed a higher end Hunter fan with remote controller (Hunter premiere, I "think") and now there's a problem. This was at a friend's house.

She uses the fan at night, and described that a couple times the light would come on in the middle of the night, like 2 or 3 am, (she's in a townhome, for what it's worth).

This week she had the dreaded "fire smell", where she shut the wall switch off and stopped using the fan until we get this safely figured out. (She tried one more time, actually, and something burned out so it didn't work at all.)

This is an 80 yr old home. Power is drawn from a circuit at the ceiling, and a switch leg controls the hot to the receiver in the canopy. I ended up calling an electrician acquaintance for some help.

After he disconnected it, he said there was power all the time to the controller, seeming to say that must have been switching the neutral, not the hot, on the switch leg. I'm fairly sure that WASN'T the case when I installed it, but now it was disconnected.... Anyway, even if that were the case, (which I think it wasn't), does that make a difference when the receiver needs power anyway for remote operation? Don't some folks just use the remote all the time? I'm trying to understand this.

After further testing, the receiver is bad, so now I'm waiting for him to pick up a new one and install it. I'm trying to figure out why a receiver would go bad after one year. Any ideas? And one other thing, yes, there was some house wire who's insulation has disintegrated a bit further than a year ago - so that was just repaired.

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