What could happened if I F*-ed up this wiring

I'm glad that worked out, but, my goodness, that's getting close to the sort of post one could want to expunge from a public forum.

I saw my dad blast away the tip of the screwdriver he was using during a similar exercise when I was young. Happily, there were no injuries then either. (The potential unpleasantness of molten screwdriver blobs varies depending on what direction they fly and where they land.)

 

I did unscrew the light bulbs... therefore opening the circuit, in theory, thus the need to double-check the wires at the switch with a circuit tester to verify that all wires were not live, before proceeding to work on the switch.

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There's a bit of too-clever-by-half in there though. By unscrewing the light bulbs, you were most likely (unless the house was wired wrong, which does happen) creating an open between the switches and neutral. That would indeed give you a reading of zero across the switch, but not at all necessarily to ground.

Now you say in #18 that you did check all the wires to the bare grounding conductors and saw zero there too. That was convenient for you (and could be fodder for an interesting investigation into why you saw that), but as you "carefully pulled the switch away" from the box and "very carefully probed the wiring", you had as yet no reason to be counting on that.

It could have been otherwise and you could still have managed to carefully pull out the switch and carefully test without incident, as long as nothing slipped. My dad would still have had the end of his screwdriver if nothing had slipped, too.

 

Deleted.

 

Isn't electricity fun! Even sometimes what one initially could think of as easy.

 

I have found that "looks easy from afar, but oh my goodness when you get right up to it" holds true for a wide variety of topics.

 

Year ago I was in my garage and all of a sudden out my side window my neighbors ac unit started making a really loud 60 cycle buzz.
We share a pole transformer.
Sounded to me like it lost a pole I shut off all my 220 breakers and ran and got my fluke unplugged my dryer turned that dryer breaker back on checked the dryer outlet and sure enough one pole was at 50 volts.

I turned my panel off. Called Duke. My neighbor had come out at this point
And said his lights were flashing too. Told him the transformer lost a pole
He had no idea what I was talking about told him to turn his panel off.

Duke came out an hour later with a bucket and hung a new transformer. Took them about 3 hours to install it.

it’s a good idea to check both poles once in while. They should be identical here there at 125 volts.
The connection method from transformer to house drops has not changed in decades.
Ancient technology. One drop lead is bolted to each of the 3 transformer legs then those leads and all house drops are split knuckled together and taped up.
All house bonds and pole drop on the center tap then the 2 poles.

Don’t know why the transformers dont have a tap bar with multiple bolt holes on each of its 3 outputs. Then crimp a big lug on the house drop wires and bolt it to each tap bar. Then put a weatherproof boot over each bar.
Now You can see the drop leads bolts to the transformer from the ground no weather protection
And no drip loop on the split knuckle taped up mess.

Ancient. Time consuming.

Or maybe they do have better transformers and Duke is to cheap to buy them and the crimp tools.