Electrical - 6.5
in my house there are like 3 or 4 recepticles in the living room that only have juice when the basement light is turned on. what do i do?
That's not that uncommon, but it's more uncommon that that switch controls more than one outlet + a light. Let me browse the internet for some visual aids cause it's kinda hard to explain but my best guess would be that it's like a lamp outlet circuit that you see many times in living rooms or bedrooms where if you want to "turn on a lamp" without constantly flicking the switch on the lamp, you wire an outlet to a switch and leave the lamp "always on" and kill the power from the switch.
OK, so there are lot of iterations possible of your circuit, and w/o seeing it it's going to be hard to pin down what your exact set up is. The switch could be set up like below, and let's just stick to the principle since I don't want to get too far off track, there are a few flavors on doing it, or the hardware of the switch could be a little different, etc.
So this is your basic light circuit, imagine in addition to the light, in parallel all those outlets are there. If you open up the switch, and pull it out (of course kill the circuit at the breaker box first) and there are more than 2 wires are any one screw, you are probably in luck and can fix this by going through, carefully, and figuring out which wire goes to the light, and which wire goes to the outlets. However, if there only like 1 wire on any screw, you're probably sunk, since you need to have the outlets and the light on separate hot wires from the switch to make the fix easy (I am assuming you want to be able to still turn the light on and off, but have the outlets always on).
Basically, if you have a separate wire running to the outlets, and to the light, you would move the hot wire to the outlet to the incoming hot, thus keeping them on the entire time. I'm actually guessing there is a good chance this is how this particular outlet is set up, with a separate hot for the light and the outlets, because it sounds like whoever owned your house before was really into like track lighting or lamps in your basement, and wanted them to all "come on" and "off" at the same time without having to go and turn each one separately. It is also possible though it was wired the less convenient way from the get go, and will need to break the outlets off from the light.
BTW, i had one of these switch/outlets in my living room, and just have a switch now that doesn't do anything, I'd rather just have the outlet always on (though, admittedly I am lazy and should just actually remove the switch and connect the wires with wire connectors, hopefully I get around to it or else whoever buys my house in the future will probably spend forever figuring out what that switch does.