The power for these lights may not be in the switch box, as it could be in
one of the lighting outlets with a switch leg to the wall switch. I would do
what Kevin suggests, as this is a potentially dangerous situation that
should be addressed. Kill all the breakers except the main. The lights
should go off, then turn on one breaker at a time until you find the one
that turns on these lights. Once you find it, turn it off then continue to
turn on the rest of the breakers to see if another breaker turns them back
on. If so, disconnect an insolate one . Also, as Kevin pointed out, it may
be a bad breaker that doesn't turn off, if this is the case, when you kill
all the breakers in the panel except the main, these lights will remain on,
and this would be the case regardless of how many sub panels you have. At
this point you need to test each breaker to find the one that's not turning
off


wrote in message
...
Sorry Kevin, I quoted you, but my response was to both of the posts
prior to yours, and then yours as well. JoeSpareBedroom said "Start
over, but spend a couple of hours at the library first, reading some
books about home wiring.", which is obviously not applicable to me.
Also, the meter suggestion is a good one, and I'll try it tonight to
check for bad breakers. I also like the suggestion of turning off all
breakers and then trying each one ON, to see if two of them power my
lights - that's something I hadn't thought of - I only went the other
way turning one at a time OFF. I also did try turning off the main
feed, which did kill the lights (how could it not, right?), but did
not try leaving the main feed on and turning off all breakers
(although I suspect that must have the same effect, since the lights
couldn't be tied to the main feed since it's 240V, right?). One more
question - since the lights are all downstream of a single switch,
which works, I should be able to kill the main power, disconnect that
switch from the circuit and be good to go, right? No power to switch,
no power to lights? That way anything else on that circuit upstream
of the switch would continue to function appropriately and even if
there was a double-circuit connection upstream of the switch, I would
be absolved from having to hunt it down. Sound acceptable or am I
missing someting?