My grandmother called me the other day to troubleshoot from half way accross the country. She installed a three way dimmer switch in her dinning room at the location most used. It turns the light on and off, but does not dim. It is an incandescent fixture and it has incandescent candelabra lamps. Even as a wireman I have been racking my brain to figure out what else it could be. After reading some other Q&As, I noticed some people suggested that a dimmer should be on the line side, doesn't the power need to go through both switches? And, therefore, shouldn't it dim regardless? I suggested she try to find dimmable bulbs as the first, easiest, and cheapest attempt to solve the issue. If it does matter which side the dimmer is on, would it help at all to have a dimmer on each end?
TIA
Electrical – When installing a three way dimmer switch, does it matter which switch is the dimmer
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Best Answer
Replacing a 3-way switch with a dimmer should be an easy project. It doesn't matter which switch gets replaced as long as the three wires are hooked up correctly. If it's wired incorrectly, the lights will not turn on and off as expected (maybe only one switch will work, maybe nothing will work).
So, turn the dimmer up all the way, and turn each switch on an off. Do the lights turn on and off as expected? If that works, but the lights do not dim, it's either because the bulbs/light fixture are not dimmable, not compatible with the dimmer you selected, or in rare cases, the new dimmer could be bad.
If the light bulbs are not just plain incandescent bulbs, I'd bet they are not dimmable. Right now, dimmable LED and CF bulbs are common, but in the past they were hard to find or unavailable.