Posted on 08/05/2020 2:01:03 PM PDT by rarestia
I’m renovating my patio and wanted to take the ceiling fan off of a switched circuit and run a dedicated feed for power since the fan is always on anyway. I found some drops in the wall near my entertainment center that seemed like a sure thing, so I killed the breaker, cut the line and started running everything to splice in the new fan circuit. While I was stripping wires, my arm touched a ground and I got nice jolt. Yes, my arm touched a ground and got jolted. Grounds are supposed to be dead, right?
Well, despite a few years as an electricians apprentice 20+ years ago, I wasn’t comfortable using this line, so I capped everything and called an electrician to diagnose what I was looking at. Turns out the former owner ran a circuit to a timer for the security flood lamps in the back pasture. Instead of running the neutral, they wired hot to the switch and ground to neutral, so I was getting 110 VAC when putting my Fluke on a ground and neutral. I’d never seen this before. The electrician told me to just go ahead and splice the cut line back together and find another line for the fan run.
When I was putting it all back together, I noticed that while twisting the ground cable I was getting little sparks like you’d see if you touched a 9V battery to a paperclip. My meter shows 0 VAC on the ground, and the whole thing is tidied up in a plastic J box, but I’m sitting here with anxiety welling up in my chest like I should just go rip everything out of the wall and re run the whole thing. It’s technically like it was before I cut it, capped splices notwithstanding. Am I being ridiculous in my trepidation? Any similar stories that could put my mind at ease?
I think y’all should not be messing with 110 AC.
That said, wiring an electrical motor on with out ability to immediately kill the power is high stupidity. Motors do catch fire and you best be able to shut it off instantly.
I took 220 once. Knocked me out cold for about 5 minutes. Lucky I was wearing a hard hat. 110 doesn’t feel nice, but it’s more of a tickle compared to getting hit by a semi.
What with what we’ve seen in the houses we’ve looked at and purchased, we just operate on the assumption now that whatever we’re looking at was screwed up somehow.
That sounds like what the electrician explained, and I agree with your assessment. I’ve been leery around the electrical in this house since we moved here, and I’ve found some seriously questionable crap. You can bet your bottom dollar we’ll be investing in proper rewiring in the future.
There are a number of things that can cause this. I cannot say definitively which of several possibilities is causing this.
I recently installed an electric water heater in my small cabin. That water heater takes two quantity 240 V feeds. I wired it up and it seemed to work fairly well. Then one time I was taking a shower, and my foot was on the drain grate, and I went to adjust the shower head and I got a pretty considerable shock. I measured the voltage between the Grate and the shower head and found 110 volts! It of course freaked me out, because I could have electrocuted myself. As it turned out, the clamp on the ground rod going into the concrete outside of the structure and near the sub panel that handles the breakers for the cabin was loose. So the water heater got its 240 volts just fine, but the center tap of the 240 volts was not necessarily zero. This can cause a situation where the ground wire inside the cabin is dragged to one or the other side of the 240 volt line, especially if there is nothing drawing current on one side of the 120 volts ordinarily formed between the 240 volts Wags and ground. This, by the way electrocuted about 10 or 12 soldiers in Iraq when they were showering in what were more or less porta potties set Up as showers. Because the generator powering the water heater was not Bonded to the center of their 240 volts to their Electrical Plumbing adequately. So that is one possible cause, that you have a loose or defective ground clamp in your system, and what appears to your eyes as a green wire and to your brain as ground is not zero volts.
Another possible cause is if the person who wired that circuitry before you placed a switch in the neutral leg of a 120 volt circuit, instead of the hot leg. In that case the hot lead to that circuit is hot all the time, even when the appliance is off, except for the fact that it goes through the filament of a light bulb.
Yet another possibility is that you have a 3-way switch somewhere in the system that keeps a neutral and a hot constantly powered.
Still another possibility is that the previous person who installed the wiring simply mixed up white and black somewhere. This was not a case of overt nor systematic racism, but you got knocked on your ass none the less. Perhaps your house was wired by Rachel dolezal, and the two colors of wires simply identified as their opposites.
I have learned this about electricity.
If you don’t know why something happened, you have a problem.
Every installation must be predictable or you need a pro to unwind the mess.
And I’ve completely re-wired an old farm, upgrading from 100amp to 200amp. Including out buildings.
Passed inspection first time.
Get yourself one of these: https://www.homedepot.com/p/Klein-Tools-Non-Contact-Voltage-Tester-NCVT-1SEN/100661787 or a good digital voltmeter, or both, and always check circuits before you monkey with them.
As others have commented on this thread, there is no telling what some other person has done to the wiring. You don't have to get Klein, there are a bunch of companies that make similar tools. That one is just pretty easy to find.
I've been in my old (vintage 1963) house for over 20 years, and still find stupid crap previous owner or someone else did that I need to fix. Best thing to do is kill power to the whole house. Then CHECK IT ANYWAY! If there are outlets on the circuit you're working, plug in a vacuum cleaner or radio with the volume turned up. When the sound stops, the circuit is dead. Then CHECK IT ANYWAY! EVERY time you do something, or take a break, CHECK IT ANYWAY! Paranoia pays. That tester just has to get near a hot wire to light up. Makes it much easier to CHECK IT ANYWAY! I've lit myself up a couple of time. I didn't enjoy it.
https://amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B00ATOYNP0/ref=sspa_mw_detail_3?ie=UTF8&psc=1
Get this set cheap and can save your life.
All your wiring problems are not gone, something somewhere is using ground as a power return. So I would start with using the.polarity trster to check every socket in the house looking for a miswired socket. Probably a clock or kitchen oven or some such With a low current device.
After all sockets pass check, place a meter between the two grounds that spark and check for DC as well as AC. When you can see the fault on the meter, turn off the breakers one at a time till the voltage goes away. That will narrow it down to which circuit. Then once fixed turn on each breaker one at a time checking meter to insure its not an idiot factor wiring job in more than one place.
Then tie the grounds together and proceed tapping the line normally.
Using a ground return for a power return could cause a toaster or other item to become live to the touch if a ground wire connection gets loose.
Yeah it works, but it does tend to kill people. DYI with sub atomic physics is hazardous. With the internet there is no excuse for wiring something wrong or making shortcuts.
(30+ Years Journeyman Electrician with current valid license)
Whatever it takes.
If you need it hot all the time, you can’t go wrong with 222 (the aforementioned Ms. Valentine, that is)...
Great suggestion.
Great suggestion.
I may be wrong but common sense says just remove the switch and twist the 2 wires together and now it is on forever. Patch the hole, maybe.
Heh
Unfortunately, Nick River’s manager didn’t realize it was 220 volt in Germany.
Whatever it takes.
Your water heater has a leaky heater coil. Replace both heater elements immediately. The ground being loose allowed the voltage leak to not be grounded out.
So you fixed the safety system, however the jacket to the heater coil is shorted out leaking electricity into the water. That you have not fixed. You most likely have bubbles showing up in your hot water because that voltage leak is hydrolyzing water into hydrogen and oxygen inside your hot water tank.
You will also save some money because water heaters break the circuit to only one hot lead when the water reaches temp. Because of that the current will not heat water BUT IT WILL STILL LEAK OUT OF THE BAD COIL into the water, then flow out the ground wire.
Waste of power and it will rot out your water heater digging holes in the tank by galvinisation.
So, service the water heater.
Or just leave the fan switch on so you can turn the fan off if the windings smoke on you.
I will mess with a lot of stuff, but not electricity.
If you were getting sparks, they were not coming from your strength. Ha ha.
A donation. Never a fee.
That’s not too bad.
I had a house that I was putting a new oven/range in the kitchen to replace a dual oven/range that was in the house. But I needed to add a new vent hood and wire that in.
When I slid out the old range and un-plugged it, I noticed a piece of sheet rock over what was once a wall receptacle, so I removed it and sure enough I could se wires stuffed in the hole but no J-box.
I went out and verified that all the breakers in the kitchen were shut off and reached in the wall with a pair of needle nose. As soon as I touched the wire it exploded in a big arc flash.
I went out to the panel to verify everything was off and then noticed that there was 60amp breaker outside the box. So I switched it off. What I determined was that many years prior to my purchasing the home they had remodeled the kitchen and this was the old feed to the range and that who ever did this just stuffed the wires back in the wall with bare ends! They were a micrometer apart from burning the house down.
I went to Home Depot, bought a J-box and some wire nuts and safely terminated this open circuit!
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