Lou Zher wrote:

snipped
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.


Questions:

1. When you say "hotness" I presume you're trying to sound like you're
"one of the boys" and are using that term to mean VOLTAGE. If not, and
you really meant that the wall switches are all thermally HOT, then pull
the main breaker move everyone out of the place and get a pro there fast!

2. What did you measure that "hotness" with? If it was a digital
multimeter, you may have been fooled by capacitive coupling allowing
just enough nanoamps through to give you a meter reading, without any
real current capability beyond that. If you're a digital guy you oughta
know, digital stuff can run on microamps, fans take AMPS. You may have
an open connection on the 120 volt (black) wire somewhere ahead of those
switches and the meter is fooling you by reading a 'phantom' voltage.

3. What did you measure that "hotness" with respect to. If it was
ground, and not the neutral return, you may have an open neutral
connection somewhere.

Best to use a light bulb to see if you've really got power available
between the output terminal of one of those fan switches and the neutral
(white) wire going up to the fan.

4. Did you ever learn what paragraph breaks are?

HTH,

Jeff










--
Jeffry Wisnia
(W1BSV + Brass Rat '57 EE)
"Rudeness is the weak man's imitation of strength."