3-way dimmer problem!

[mensrea]

Hey guys, I'm new here. I'm from Ottawa, Ontario and have recently just bought my first house. I also just got married!

Anyways, I'm trying to get fimiliar with everything to do with the house (I have hardly any experience before). I've installed a few light fixtures, light switches, etc (stuff like that).

LAst night, I installed a dimmer which happens to be on a 3-way circuit.

Here's my problem:

The dimmer (we'll call it A) can only turn on the light if the other switch (let's call it B) is set to the ON position. If B is set to off and I try to turn on the light from A, the light turns on for half a second but basically turns off as soon as the switch is totally pressed in.

Has anyone ever encountered this before? The dimmer has 2 black wires, 1 red and 1 green. The green I attached to a grounding screw, the red I attached to the red wire that was already there and I attached the 2 black wires to the existing white and black wires.

When this first happened I thought I may have crossed the black and white wires, so I reversed them. No luck there. Same outcome. The light won't turn on from A without B being on....

Any help would be muchly appreciated... I will continue to research.

Take care,

Jason

[joed]

The red wire from the dimmer needs to be attached to the wire that was on the common screw of the switch. This will not be hard to fix. You only have 2 other wires to try it on. Move the red dimmer wire to the black wire. If that doesn't work try it on the white wire.

[John Nelson]

You made the most common mistake when installing a 3-way switch: you misidentified the common.

[mensrea]

Worked!!!! :)

Thanks a lot guys... expect me to be checking in here a lot!