Hello, Had an electrician do work unrelated to hot water. He did the super easy stuff and then announced he had to leave instead of fixing the main problem. Part of a circuit has lost power and there is no crawl space to check the ceiling wires so I wanted someone who'd have a better guess on what part of the ceiling might need to be broken to get to the problem. He shut several breakers, including the double one for hot water, the adjacent double on where there is a problem and I smelled something burning and one that had a small easy bit to wire. I turned hot water breaker back on and no noise, no hot water. Check the breaker with multimeter and it's good. Go to check that the water heater is getting power and I get no reading on the multimeter but the little power tester beeps like mad. Double checked the multimeter is working at an outlet and it is working. Is it possible someone wired the electric hot water heater to 2 separate double breakers? Hate to turn on a breaker that had something burning to see if that's the case. I will be trying to track the other problem and breaking through the ceiling myself but was hoping for some info on the hot water heater since that's more important than what's on the other electrical circuit. Thanks for the help!

I have a panel of three 3-way switches and two of the switches need to be replaced. However instead of finding three lines of 14/3 wires in the electrical box, there are two such lines plus three lines of 14/2, all of which are intermingled, and I do not know which lines are powering which lights. Further, I am replacing pre-wired switches with screw terminal switches, so the fact that they are all capped together makes it impossible to figure out what came from where. I am trying to figure out how to replace the switches without having to rewire everything, and would love some suggestions if anyone can help figure this out. I will try to attach a picture of what I have figured out and apologize for the lack of circuitry conventions. The first two switches are what need replacing. [ATTACH]60087[/ATTACH] Edit: also of note, the line labeled common on switch 3 is red. I have always understood common as neutral, but was under the impression that red was generally a hot wire.