Is it possible that there is a second switch on each of the fans that
controls speed?
Perhaps a pull chain that goes off, low, medium, high?
And that someone turned them off?
Are the wall switches simple on-off toggles or are they speed controls?


Lou Zher wrote:
It was a dark and muggy night. I was working late and got home to a home
full of thick damp July night air. I switched on a ceiling fan, but it just
stood there, as still and quiet as the soggy bleakness of the Midwest
summer. "Hmmph. Another broken ceiling fan." You see, in this house there
are only seven ceiling fans, and more than half of them have met an untimely
death in the last year. I can't say for sure that this is a serial killing,
and autopsies are hard to come by, but here's the facts about the ceiling
fans: the master bedroom, the kitchen and the den have the three working
ones; the gazebo, the entryway, and the other two bedrooms have the four
that have failed this year. I'm no 60 cycle gumshoe, I prefer the safety and
comfort of digital logic, but I did try rebooting the house, one
circuit-breaker at a time and hunting down all the GFCI resets... no effect.
A check of the neighborhood revealed hotness on the wall switches leading to
the fans. Is my luck really that bad? What do these poor victims have in
common, other than they are fans? I needed answers like I needed air
movement. Could some sort of electrical tsunami simple wash upon my shores
and vanish, laying waste to these hearty induction motors whilst sparing all
my more delicate and expensive electronics? "Well, maybe I'm not so unlucky
after all," I mumbled out loud. Could it be that a house would be wired with
four ceiling fans, sort of scattered around the house, on a common circuit?
Could it be that this circuit has suddenly failed in a way that didn't
merely trip the breaker? Could it really be that one of these failed ceiling
fans has a separate circuit for its attached lighting? A problem as sticky
as the heavy motionless mass fogging up my glasses, a problem for the fine
folks at ahr to help me out with.
-LZ