Yesterday, Tara and I finally did something I’ve been meaning to do for years (since we bought the house)… replace the old “round” electrical receptacles with newer “rectangular” ones. All and all, it was easy work, but somewhat stressful as we only had about an hour to do them all before the sun went down and made that part of the house too dark to work. In that time, we did about 15 receptacles, and 5 switches. 2 of those switches being 3-ways. And that’s where the fun began.
So, I removed the old 3-way switches, and made mental note of which wires went where. But, upon putting the new ones on, I couldn’t get them to work right. One of them would work correctly only if the other way turned on. If the other one was turned off, the first switch wouldn’t work at all. Now, this could have been an early sign that the first switch was bad (as it did stop working at all later that night), but at the time, I really couldn’t figure it out.