On Thursday, June 20, 2013 7:11:20 PM UTC-7, Fred McKenzie wrote:
In article , Robert Macy wrote: As I said, if light switches can be made to be all down when off; it's easy to tell which light switch activated the light. But, when you have a rack of switches in arbitray positions and all your lights are out but one... Robert- I missed the earlier comments, but I see a point of confusion. Do you want any one switch to be able to turn off the light if a different switch turned it on? That requires a string of switches, with the end switches in a SPDT configuration. Any intermediate switches would be in a DPDT configuration. (There may be some 4 terminal switches intended for this function.) As mentioned, you could swap two wires at any one of the switches to give you "All Down Equals OFF". But that would be of little value if you want to know which one switch was responsible for leaving the light on. For that, you would simply connect all SPST switches in parallel. All switches in the up position would need to be turned off for the light to go off. Then you would not have "N-Way" switches where one of N switches could turn off a light another switch turned on. Fred

Fred, can't understand the source for this confusion. I want any switch to be able to turn ON/OFF the lights as before. It's just that I need to be able to 'set' them all up at least once in their lifetime so that late at night it's easier to figure out which switch turned on the light. Hopefully somebody read my replies and can see how it can get out of hand when you have MANY, up to 5 switches in a single row, as to figure it out easily. like second nature, oh that switch is up therefore that's the switch to turn it back off. don't have to think about it. You have no idea what it's like to be confronted with five switches all set to arbitrary positions to quickly shut the one you want off - without turning on one you don't want.