Home Electrical Help, Plus Poll!

What would you do?

  • Total voters
    48
cgasner1 said:
I would call the power company and tell them you have voltage issues and have them check it under load behind the meter if they can. The issue may not even be your house but the line into it. Idk where your at but I always tell customers to call us before a electrician since we don’t charge
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Fantastic advise. We actually had a bad line two years ago because lightning had hit our pole and the splice just before it got fried and then coming out and fixing it for free did the trick to restore full service to our property
 
seeth07 said:
Fantastic advise. We actually had a bad line two years ago because lightning had hit our pole and the splice just before it got fried and then coming out and fixing it for free did the trick to restore full service to our property
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Depending on where he is and the moisture in the ground from the year it’s our busy time for fixing issues like this especially if your line is underground and someone just put in a new fence
 
Is your line underground or overhead from the house out to the utility
 
Of you bought a cheap meter it could be as simple as the meter is a pos.

If the previous owner was into diy electrical then there are most likely grounding issues which can be very dangerous.

Call a good electrician!
 
I keep thinking about this... I am an electrician and if this was my house I would be concerned. Your house isn't going to burn down but those voltage differentials between ground and neutral are really dangerous. Say your receptacle is not grounded and you have an appliance plugged into it. If there is a fault in the wiring on the appliance that touches the metal frame of the appliance all of the metal on the appliance would become energized instead of tripping your breaker in your panel. When you or a family member grabs the appliance it would be the equivalent of touching your "hot" wire. Potentially very dangerous or lethal. I've been an industrial electrician my whole career so my residential knowledge is pretty minimal but if your house only has the 2 wire cabling I believe all of those receptacles are supposed to be GFCI's. Many times homeowners will swap out the old 2 wire recepts for a 3 wire and just not connect the ground wire.
 
seeth07 said:
Not having a ground isn't a huge deal as the neutral is the ground assuming that the neutral bar is actually grounded to the well ground. So step one I would do is look at the box, follow the ground/neutral wire and see if I can find the deep copper grounding rod.
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Disagree. You're assumption is a system that is working correctly. The ground is never used in a normal operating system.

The ground is there primarily for when your hot wire accidentally energizes the steel of a device, say a fridge. In this case the neutral doesn't offer any way for the electricity to flow back to the utility xfmr. It's correct path would be to use the ground wire to get back to the load center, then use the neutral to ground bond to complete the loop with the utility xfmr.

If you remove the ground the likely path is from the hot appliance, through your body, to the ground rod outside, through the ground wire to the neutral to ground bond in the load center back to the xfrm, Thereby placing your body in the loop and risking heart fibrillation due to low level current across the heart.


Saying not having the ground isn't a big deal is incorrect in almost all situations. There are a few ways to get away with it in old houses and it almost always uses a gfci device to provide personnel protection.
 
SD_Prairie_Goat said:
Disagree. You're assumption is a system that is working correctly. The ground is never used in a normal operating system.

The ground is there primarily for when your hot wire accidentally energizes the steel of a device, say a fridge. In this case the neutral doesn't offer any way for the electricity to flow back to the utility xfmr. It's correct path would be to use the ground wire to get back to the load center, then use the neutral to ground bond to complete the loop with the utility xfmr.

If you remove the ground the likely path is from the hot appliance, through your body, to the ground rod outside, through the ground wire to the neutral to ground bond in the load center back to the xfrm, Thereby placing your body in the loop and risking heart fibrillation due to low level current across the heart.


Saying not having the ground isn't a big deal is incorrect in almost all situations. There are a few ways to get away with it in old houses and it almost always uses a gfci device to provide personnel protection.
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I was just pointing out that a two wired house without a ground isn't a huge deal as there are ways around it. A lot of devices have ground fault protection built in. You can swap out the outlets to have ground fault protection. You can buy devices that you plug into the two wire outlet and then plug your devices into them (basically an external ground fault protection outlet).

Not having the box grounded at all though is something I would certainly check for given the voltage readings the OP is getting it. I have a hunch that there either is a wire hooked up backwards in the box providing power to the neutral/ground bar and/or there is a bad ground wire to the grounding rod.
 
If @Pucky Freak doesn't mind me tagging onto his thread, I've got a question.

So I've finished doing all the lighting in the basement and was feeling confident in my eletrical abilities but am getting crushed by a 3-way light debacle.

When we moved in the living room overhead could only be turned on with one light switch, there was a switch "that did nothing" (previous owner) by the door that was clearly an orphan 3way.

Here's what I think it's supposed to be wired like.

1692645858660.png

When I pulled it apart it looked like someone had gone to install a new fixture panicked at the hot white wire. They had put all the white wires and black wires from the first switch, and the fixture into wire nuts, left the reds connected and called it good.

On the switch with power the common was also reversed with one of the black travelers.

Anyway I think that's the deal.

First switch box has 14-2 power, 14-3 going to the fixture, and 14-2 going out to an outlet, overhead has, 14-3 coming in from switch one, 14-3 going to switch 2 and then 14-2 going out to another outlet.

Switch 2 has the 14-3 coming in but is a double switch with the porch light and is being used as a junction so 14-3 + 3(14-3) in that box.

Needless to say it was a little interesting figuring it out. Also the hot white from the 2nd three way was not taped black or otherwise marked as hot.

Anyway I thought I had gotten it all fixed but now I've got the classic if switch one is in the off position then switch 2 won't work.

Any idea where the likely culprit is?

Traveler attached to hot in the fixture instead of another traveler?
 
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wllm said:
If @Pucky Freak doesn't mind me tagging onto his thread, I've got a question.

So I've finished doing all the lighting in the basement and was feeling confident in my eletrical abilities but am getting crushed by a 3-way light debacle.

When we moved in the living room overhead could only be turned on with one light switch, there was a switch "that did nothing" (previous owner) by the door that was clearly an orphan 3way.

Here's what I think it's supposed to be wired like.

View attachment 288771

When I pulled it apart it looked like someone had gone to install a new fixture panicked at the hot white wire. The had put all the white wires and black wires from the first switch, and the fixture into wire nuts, left the reds connected and called it good.

On the switch with power the common was also reversed with the one of the black travelers.

Anyway I think that's the deal.

First switch box has 14-2 power, 14-3 going to the fixture, and 14-2 going out to an outlet, overhead has, 14-3 coming in from switch one, 14-3 going to switch 2 and then 14-2 going out to another outlet.

Switch 2 has the 14-3 coming in but is a double switch with the porch light and is being used as a junction so 14-3 + 3(14-3) in that box.

Needless to say it was a little interesting figuring it out. Also the hot white from the 2nd three way was not taped black or otherwise marked as hot.

Anyway I thought I had gotten it all fixed but now I've got the classic if switch one is in the off position then switch 2 won't work.

Any idea where the likely culprit is?

Traveler attached to hot in the fixture instead of another traveler?
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Traveler attached to hot in the fixture or you have one of the travellers on the common terminal in the first switch?
 
GrantK said:
Traveler attached to hot in the fixture
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Bingo, I’m and idiot, I even mentioned that the hot and traveler were switched on switch 1 in my comment I reversed those but then didn’t fix that in the fixture 🤦‍♂️.
 
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Loose neutral/ground floating somewhere OR somewhere is a California (or minnesota) 3way and is bleeding off.

Identify the circuit, kill it. Check all connections. You may have a neutral-neutral of opposing a-b hooked up somewhere too.

99% not a utility issue. Mostly never a utility issue.
 
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Take 2 bare copper wires and hold them firmly in each hand. Stick them in the nearest outlet. If you didn't like the ZAP you received then call someone who knows what the hell he is doing.
 
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