"Here I come to save the dayyyyyyyy!"

Okay, this is an easy one now. I suggest you read lesson #2 in the electric primer. Go ahead, I'll walt. All done? Okay. Remember, you're working with live wires! Be careful! Hire an electrician if you're less than sure of what you're doing.

Step one in eliminating the 4-way is to identify which pair of travelers come from which 3-way. The easiest way to do this is to pull out the 4-way and one of the 3-ways, and use a tester; in each instance, test to ground or a neutral.

The black'n'white on the dark terminals come from one 3-way, and the black'n'white on the light terminals come from the other 3-way. We need to know which. Here's how:

At each 3-way, the black on the darker terminal (the 'common') is either the always-hot wire or the switched-hot wire. The other two wires, one white and one black, are the travelers.

With the light on or off, doesn't matter which, check which of the travelers is hot. Now go to the 4-way, and see which wire is hot in each pair: the light-screw pair and the dark-screw pair.

It could be both whites, both blacks, or one of each. If it's one of each, you know which pair is which by which pair of travelers matches the 3-way's travelers. If both hots are the same color, then flip the 4-way.

One of the pairs will now be swapped; hot will have switched colors on one pair. Now go back to the 3-way and check for hots on the travelers.

If the colors have swapped there, you've found the other end of the pair that swapped at the 4-way; if they haven't swapped, then they are the other end of the pair that didn't swap at the 4-way.

Okay, now you know which travelers come from the switch you want to eliminate. It's all downhill from here! Don't forget to kill the circuit! Just cap the white wire at both ends, and connect the black common to the black traveler.

You should be able to figure out the rest. The black traveler of the capped-white-wire pair has become the common. In other words, the common has been extended to the ex-4-way location.

Now, you can install whatever controller you need wherever you need to. Just make sure what you use is designed to be used together in a 3-way switching arrangement.

I hope this was simple enough while still being informative enough to be helpful.

Larry
www.fineelectricco.com