Mobile Home. Yard lights are "typically" tapped off the back of an outlet and buried in the ground. I have wired the wire from the house directly to the light bulb. I will worry about putting the light sensor in when I get the bulb to work. I have volts on the black wire….. and the same volts on the white wire. (Tested with a Klein voltage tester.) Am I right that there should be no volts on the white wire? I think this means that the white, common wire, is not going back to the common in the fuse box. The other lights on that circuit, CB #1, are all working fine making me think that wherever the tap in was done…the white wire has come loose…..? Then the problem will be finding the place where the tap was done….
Electrical – Yard Light has Volts but no light
electrical
Related Solutions
I may have missed something in your question, but aren't you going to need a neutral for the Maestro switch? Check out Wiring Diagram 8 here:
http://www.lutron.com/TechnicalDocumentLibrary/369666.pdf
Sounds like white (neutral) isn't connected somewhere. Find it and fix it!
Best Answer
There should be 120 volts AC between the red and black wire. Or sometimes, 12 volts DC. If there is not, there is no power there.
Electrical power works in loops. There need to be 2 wires involved or nothing happens. The way we do electricity in the US, the white wire is one of those two wires, but it is kept as close to earth ground as possible, so it is called neutral.
One way power can fail is for the white (neutral) wire to become disconnected or damaged. This breaks the loop, obviously. And since it is not connected, it will pick up stray voltage by induction. In which case you can see a weak phantom voltage on the neutral. If a non-contact tester shows voltage on both, perhaps that has happened.