Electrical – Removing switches from 4 way switch

electrical

We have a situation like the following image:

enter image description here

The only difference is the wire on the far right switch going from the switch up to the light is red instead of black.

All of those switches are powered and control each other but don't control an actual light. My thought is one of the two main living lights may previously had been a fan or something that are no longer there.

The switch in the far right of the image we want to put an insteon scene switch. The top left button would be the on and off for the switch which wouldn't actually control anything, but the 7 other buttons we could program to control scenes in the house.

We want to remove the other 2 switches that are part of the 4 way. If we just cap them all off, then the one on the far right won't be powered up and wouldn't work.

To note, the two we want to remove are each part of gang boxes with other switches so the cables would still be fully accessible later on by taking the switch face plate off for future owners.

So what we did was the middle switch in the image, attached red to red and black to black. That works. For the other switch (far left in image), not sure what we need to do, cap the all off? Attached certain wires to each other?

Best Answer

In the right-hand box -- take the red and black that go to the traveler terminals on the switch, and cap them off. There will be a likely white wire (hopefully tagged black or red) in that same cable that connects to a black wire -- unhook that nut and cap off the white wire. This disconnects the switch loop entirely. Then wire the black that was connected to the likely-white (maybe tagged) wire to the line terminal on the Insteon switch. From there, you can remove the wire from the common terminal on the switch and connect it to the load terminal on the Insteon switch, and connect the neutral terminal on the Insteon switch to the neutral bundle in the box (with a white pigtail if need be). Ground the Insteon switch, and put everything back together in this box.

The center box can be left as-is. In the left box, your job is simple -- take the wires off the existing switch and cap them all individually.