As a temporary expedient while awaiting more outlets in the basement, I screwed several hundred watts of LED strip lighting to the floor joists so I could see where I was going:
The switch seemed to run warm, which I attributed to being snuggled up against one of the LED strips, eventually became intermittent, and finally failed with the lights out.
Prying apart the snapped-together case destroyed it, but that didn’t really matter when I saw the innards:
The “intermittent” action came from the melted post on the switch actuator at the top of the photo. The “warm” came from the barely crimped black wire on the right side of the switch, which *might* have had half a dozen strands caught in the flattened crimp triangles.
I replaced it with an identical switch from the assortment that came with the lamps. That one seems to run cooler, although I doubt the crimps are really up to any reasonable quality standards.
In addition to adding basement outlets & lighting circuits, the rest of the house has some electrical wiring peculiarities; the kitchen microwave really shouldn’t share a circuit with the dining room lights.
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 
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2 responses to “LED Light Switch: FAIL”
This must be the weekend of electrical fun and games. The house came with horrible outlets and switches. After some smoke, they got replaced years ago. The rest of the wiring is quirky, but to 2000 era code.
However, the latest one was an own goal on my part. For various reasons, I replaced the GFCI outlet on the kitchen island with a GFCI breaker. Seemed to do fine since 2016.
This weekend’s thunderstorm proved me wrong. Some impressive booms, but the one that got the substation/line caused glitches before the full outage. Didn’t come up cleanly either.
The next morning, I found one bank of kitchen outlets was out. Looked at the sub-panel and that GFCI breaker had tripped. Got suspicious, and found the refrigerator was on that circuit, too. (Frigidaire for the win. It went 9 hours and kept the coolth overnight.)
So, a GFCI outlet is on the shopping list, though my spare breaker stash had the right 20A Square D one. (The place is part Square D, part Cutler-Hammer boxes. Arggh.)
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