Garage Lights stopped working...need some help

[Buildscharacter]

Hopefully someone out there can point me in the right dirrection.

A few months ago, I installed three hanging t5 dual bulb flourescent fixtures in my garage. The wiring in the attic about the garage was set up so that the switch on the wall turned on and off the garage door opener outlet but nothing else.

During the project, I took the wire coming off the switch (was going into an outlet) and wired it to my 3 light fixtures. I am by no means an electrician or even close, but I did buy boxes and terminated all the wires in a safe manner. For months the lights worked fine. Then the other day, they just stopped working.

I checked the fuse box and nothing is blown. I checked the switch and the switch is receiving power and working correctly. I went into the attic and opened up my main junction box that splits the line out to the three lights and that wire is not receiving any power.

I am kind of at a loss right now as to what else I can do to troubleshoot this or continue trying to figure out what caused it. Any suggestions would be appreciated.

 

[pattenp]

To make sure I understand what you checked. You said you checked power to the switch, but did you also check that power is coming out of the switch at the switch?

 

[TonkaJoe]

If you daisy chained the lights it sounds like maybe a loose wire somewhere? it doesn't take much...

 

[dw1]

If you have a volt meter of some type, and you have 120v on both screws on the switch, I would get up in attic and check your joints you made, I bet a wire is not in there good and came loose.

 

[Bigbandguy]

Definitely check the connection coming out of the switch.. it is quite possible for the wire to be fatigued from the manipulation necessary to get it under the screw... use a neon tester and make sure the wire is both hot with the switch on and not broken right at the switch... Then at the end going INTO the daisy chained lights check for hot ahead of the split. If no power then see above, there is a broken wire somewhere OR that switch is bad . If I had to bet I would guess the problem is somewhere around the switch or at the first daisy chain contact since none of the downstream lights are working. A good test would be to take an extension cord to the daisy chain split and jumper power to the lights there just to prove there are no downstream problems. If the distance is not too great you could run a single strand of wire jumping each conductor in turn to determine which is bad, the white or the black. My guess is that you will find a break right at the switch.

 

[MFolks]

Were the wires "Back Stabbed", or connected to the side of the switch? Back stabbed ones will over time get loose or corrode, possibly causing this problem. I've never liked wiring this way, sure it's quick, but not the way I do things, as side terminals on switches are how I wire.

 

[teamextreme]

Beginners usually have the hardest time with making proper wire nut connections. They ****** up the twisting and one of them comes out, or doesn't make good enough connection. I would focus on those. Also, remember it takes 2 wires to make a circuit. You're checking the hot at the switch, but did you check the neutral? How did you measure the voltage? Non-contact meter, or standard VOM? If VOM where did you measure the hot to, ground or neutral? I would start at one of the defective lights and see if you are missing the hot or neutral. That at least narrows it down by 50%. Measure from hot to ground to see if the hot is present. If it is, you've lost a neutral, likely in a wire nut.

 

[teamextreme]

Were the wires "Back Stabbed", or connected to the side of the switch? Back stabbed ones will over time get loose or corrode, possibly causing this problem. I've never liked wiring this way, sure it's quick, but not the way I do things, as side terminals on switches are how I wire.

Good advice on the back stabs, but his install is only a few months old. As crappy as back stabs are, they will certainly last a few months without failing.

 

[Bigbandguy]

Good point about the back stab connections... I didn't think of those since I never use them. A lot of times a wire will ease out from under the screw as it is being tightened and later finish the job. Newbies might miss that. I think the point about the wire nut may be the one that finds the fix.

 

[Buildscharacter]

Thanks for all the suggestions. After reading through some of them, I decided to go and take another look at the switch, as it seems like many folks thought that that would be the point of failure (my initial assumption as well). Yes, the wires are 'backstabbed', but when I tested the voltage, I found that there was a full 120v going in and the switch operated correctly to stop electricity from passing when switching. Not that I think it matters, but since I'm not 100% sure, I might as well mention that the switch just has two wires going to it. The ground wires in the box are all bound together.

I also went back up into the attic to check the main junction box for the power from the switch gets split to the three lights, which brings me to another question. I currently have the lights set up so that the power from the switch hits a junction box and splits out to the three different lights. Should I have daisy chained the lights together instead of doing the split like I did?

One final element I wanted to mention... the switch is on the back wall of my garage, about 5-6 ft. from my breaker box. The lights in the garage (as well as the power line, run up from the switch straight up to the box that I installed to split the power to the three lights, so I have pretty good access to a pretty short run.

Thanks everyone. I can post pictures tonight if that will help.

 

[rick2752]

Alright you have voltage coming out of the switch correct? What colors wires are on the switch. Is it possible that there is a 3way switch turned off by another door? Do you have voltage coming into your junction box? Turn the breaker off and check the wire nut that has the voltage coming in. It's easy to twist a wire out if you have 4 wires. I like to line up the insulation and twist my wires with a pair of lineman's pliers before I use a wire nut that way I can see the twist and confirm I have all wires. I then cut off the excess and wire nut them together.

 

[dw1]

P.S. just because you have voltage on both screws of the switch, doesnt mean you have a good connection on the wire going out to the lights. Since we are troubleshooting now, turn the breaker off, put the black wires on the switch under the screws on the switch. Turn everything back on, check the J-Box, do you have voltage there (Check the black and white coming from the switch 120v) no, it doesnt matter if you come out of that J-Box three times to three different lights, if none of those lights are working, work from J-Box back, check both connections, Black and white wires, you could have a neutral that came loose

 

[TonkaJoe]

These guys are on the right track for finding your issue.. daisy chaining the lights is added simplicity of having one switch carrying the same load to all of your lights, and is easy to wire up. Black- Black, White- White , Ground to your light fixture twisted with a pigtail to your box grounding both the fixture and box together. Makes finding problems within the fixture or wiring easy since all connections are the same. But completely up to you as to weather you want to wire it like that or not.

 

[Elginz]

Neutral wire nut in the box behind the switch, or in the junction box? It seems there are a lot of wires in a wire nut in the one junction box, just something that can be hard to get them all placed in the nut properly.

 

[Buildscharacter]

I finally had some time to get into the garage this weekend and do some additional troubleshooting.

I had an extra switch, so I figured that was the easiest way to go about testing to make sure that the connections to the switch and the switch itself were good to go. Putting in the new switch did the trick. I tested it at the first j-box and had power. I then took the old switch and wired that back up just to validate and it worked too! I guess, like others have mentioned, that the connection to the switch was the issue.

Thank you all for the assistance.

 

[Bigbandguy]

Thanks for letting us know how it came out. I have seen many a thread where the final fix was left hanging up in the air. Glad you got it going.. In general back stab connections tend to be less reliable than getting the wire under the screw. That is a good place to look when something like this happens.