Had a real mess with a three-way switch in an old house in Springfield

I was rewiring a hallway and found the previous guy used the wrong color traveler wire. It was a red wire where a black should have been, and it threw my whole test off. I had to pull out my Fluke meter and trace every single connection back to the panel to figure out the real path. Has anyone else run into this kind of color code mix-up in older homes?

3 comments

3 Comments

the_daniel2mo ago

Yeah, that's why you can't trust old wiring colors at all.

finley7772mo ago

You're right @the_daniel, I've seen black wires used as hot in some old houses and neutral in others. It's a real safety issue.

gibson.oliver13d ago

Respectfully @the_daniel, I get why people say that, but I've seen enough old work to know color coding actually has some logic to it if you dig back far enough. In houses from the 50s and earlier, the color codes in local codes were sometimes different from what we use now, and electricians often stuck with what their local inspector accepted. I've pulled apart 1940s knob-and-tube where the hot was actually white with a black tracer, and the neutral was just plain white. The trick is knowing what era you're dealing with and checking against old code books, not just assuming everything is random. That red traveler the original poster found might have been perfectly fine under the code that was current when that house was built.