Ceiling Fan Won't Turn Off via Switch After New Switch Installed

[Rftoomey]

I've been installing new outlets and switches in a condo my wife and I recently bought.The old ones were fine, but the wrong color. I've been replacing like for like, swapping the older Leviton beige switches for newer white ones. I've replaced single pole switches with single poles, 3-ways with 3-ways, and 4-ways with 4-ways. And I've tried in all cases to connect the existing wires in each box to the same terminals on each new switch. (I'm an extreme novice when it comes to electrical work.) The problem I'm having is with a 3-gang switch group in the family room. The right-hand dial is a rheostat control for the chandelier in the room... Pushing it in turns it on and off and spinning it varies the brightness. It's working OK (probably because I didn't touch it; I just substituted the existing beige knob for the white one in the photo...; - ) The middle switch is SUPPOSED to turn the ceiling fan on/off, and it did before I changed the switch. Now the ceiling fan is on all the time; toggling the switch does nothing. The only way I can now turn the fan off is either flipping the breaker which controls the circuit the fan is on or standing on a chair and pulling on the fan's chain. (It's a fan-only ceiling fan; there is no light fixture on it.) The left switch also turns the chandelier on/off. I don't think it did this before I messed with these switches; I'm guessing it was just linked to a switched outlet, but I haven't gotten that far yet.

When I pulled the left & middle switches out of the box, installed the new switches and reconnected the wires, I obviously miswired something because that's when the fan stayed on constantly (and when - I think but am not positive - the left switch also started turning the chandelier off/on. Note that both switches are single-pole and each is connected to three wires. The middle switch (the one which used to control the fan but now does nothing) has 1 red & 2 black wires and the left switch has 3 black wires. Any help/suggestions sincerely appreciated. See attached photos.

 

[Rftoomey]

Thanks for getting back to me. I have a non-contact voltage detector (a Klein; it works well), so I can for sure determine which wire on the middle switch is hot. I agree with you that labeling is a good practice, but I had 28 switches to swap and for each one, my method was to carefully wire each new switch EXACTLY like the older Leviton I was removing. This worked without issue for 26 of the 28; it's just the two in the photo that are giving me grief. And remember: I never touched the rheostatically controlled switch . So I only have 2 switches/6 wires to deal with. I've already done quite a bit of trial and error wire swapping but so far no luck. I will remove the two switches, and test EACH wire to determine which ones are hot and report back. I do not have other electrical test equipment here, but I could grab an ammeter from our other place.

 

[Rftoomey]

Ok... I disconnected all 6 wires from the two switches and tested each one. One black wire that had been connected to each switch was hot for a total of 2 hot wires, one per switch. The other 3 black wires and the red wire are not hot.

 

[chopnhack]

Hi Rf, now with the wires exposed and the hot's identified, I would wire nut one hot to work safer and then using another wire nut, temporarily join the one hot with the other unidentified black/red wires, one by one, in an attempt to find out where they go. My only concern with using this method is that potentially the red wire could be a switched hot, meaning that it could go live when a switch is thrown elsewhere giving you 220v on that line and potentially damaging something! As for the fan staying on, well that would indicate that possibly one of those 'travelers' (red wire) might have been hot and when you thought your switch was off, it was receiving power from another switch elsewhere. I hope that makes some sense.