Trying to dissect my Dimmer switch

We have a dimmer switch in our guest room that switches both the ceiling light and the top outlet of a duplex. I'm not a huge fan of the single switch for multiple devices (especially a dimmer on the duplex...really limits what I can plug in!), but we're having trouble figuring out how this switch was wired. The switch box has two 2 wire cables and one 3 wire cable coming into it. I've drawn a (very) rough diagram of what we found when we opened the wall plate. The copper ground wires were twisted together and attached to nothing. The white (neutrals?) were connected with a pigtail connector. The 3 way was split with one hot going to the top of the switch, and one going to the bottom. Any insight into this? We would like to separate the outlet and ceiling fixture to be switched separately, with nothing on a dimmer.

 

That is a code violation. Easiest not to touch the switch and make the changes at the receptacle. What is the wiring at the receptacle.

 

I was worried that might be the case. I'll need to recruit some help to move furniture so we can get to the outlet - I'll get back to you is afternoon!

 

Out of curiosity, would we have the option of replacing the dimmer switch with a standard single pole switch? Or would that still be a violation?

 

Yes. The issue is that you cannot control a receptacle with a dimmer.

 

yes you may have 2 switches. if you have a 2-gang box .....you may have 2 single pole switches.

if you only have a 1 gang box you should buy a stack switch. 2 single pole switches on 1 frame.

i would think that the wire nut with the red wire is the hot and the other wire nut is the load............the black with the red is going to the half outlet and the black going up to the light

on the stack switch will be 2 screws on each side.

one side will have a jumper between the screws....this is for the hot wire. aka line side
leave the red and black wirenuted as it is now and hook it up to this side

open the wirenut with the 2 blacks and place one on each screw on the load side.

 

I just posted a few minutes ago and immediately deleted it. I realized I confused 2 of the cables.
My apologies...

It looks like John is correct. On your diagram:
The bottom left black is source hot, it's pigtailed to provide power to switch and hot half of receptacle via red wire.
The switch is now hot when turned on. The other switch terminal goes to light and switched half of receptacle.
If there's any confusion on how to wire a stacked switch, please post back.
But as John stated, one switch terminal will go to light.
The other will go to outlet.
You don't really need to open up receptacle box and look in there.