Low voltage reading at fixture

First time posting.
I'm troubleshooting an issue with wiring and voltage readings after experiencing a non-working ceiling fan. One day the fan (and light) was working then one day not. I removed the fan to verify I had voltage going to it. With breaker ON I'm getting a reading of 057.7 VAC (not sure why the leading zero is there) using a digital multimeter across hot and neutral. And at the wall switch I'm reading 23.4 VAC. No ground wire is in use.

After partially tracing the wiring I see the following.



I'm also experiencing strange readings at the second fixture located at the junction box in the drawing. With breaker ON and wall switch ON I'm reading 120 VAC across hot and neutral but with wall switch OFF the reading is 60 VAC.

Any explanations or suggestions on how to further troubleshoot this situation is greatly appreciated.

 

Spurious readings like that are why we recomend an analog multimeter. Power either comes in at the fan or the switch. That is the only place you need to measure the voltage. If you have two or more whites connected only to each other at the switch that is where the power comes in. If you have only a black and white wire on the switch the powers comes in at the light. Please tell us where power comes in?

 

Power comes in at the light.
Tonight I replaced the switch just in case. And I connected a simple light in place of the ceiling fan. Now I'm reading 120V at the switch (regardless if it's ON or OFF) and still only 58V at the light.

 

So that means when the switch is off only one terminal shows 120v and when the switch is on both are live.

You said there are no grounds so what are you checking to ? From hot to ?

 

At the switch I'm checking from hot to neutral while connected.

UPDATE: From the diagram below there are two wires going to the fan. They had hot and netrual (one from each wire) connected to the fan. The other two hot/neutral are separately connected with a wire conector. When I read across hot/neutral on one pair I get 0V, so this must be the wre going to the switch. On the other pair I read 120V, so that's from the source. Does it make sense to have the hot and neutral from the two separate wires going to the fan and the other two going to the switch? Like I said erlier, this same wiring worked for years but quit the other day.

 

You have a switch leg according to your diagram..... which means there is no neutral there.

 

Would it make sense to switch the wiring to this?

 

Yes. Haven't read the while thread but it sounds like the switch was by passed so the fan was always hot and controlled by the pull chains or a remote,

 

Yes! In your diagram in post #1 the neutral is being switched.