Here in Denver, Colorado. The compliant is that they lost power, half the house is out of power and the other part of the house is working. A great indicator is for someone over the phone calls me is do you have an electric or gas ranger or an electric or gas dryer. If you have electric that is great you can typically you can turn on the electric ranger on all the coils burners or glass top as well as the bake element, broil element and also the electric dryer and also the washer as well. You should see stuff fluctuating because both the ideas use both phases on the house. Have to have protective gloves, these circuits are running and can hurt you! What we are looking at is to show you how to indicate this. Here is the panel, you have a main breaker at 100 amps and below it are your branch circuits , your neutrals and your grounds. This is an older home, so design is different than a newer home. Take a meter on voltage on AC side, clamp on to something. What you are trying to look for is phase to phase, getting 248 or here to her on breaker 248. Here is her should be 120, also on B phase 120. Remind you that it is a nominal voltage, you can get from 120 to 123. If you see it at 127 volts, then you will start popping light bulbs. But in this scenario, I have had homes where the voltage fluctuated worse once I turned on all the appliances. You would catch it on your meter. All of a sudden your meter, one phase would go up to 180 to 220 volts, then your other phase would drop down to maybe 50 volts. That indicates that a neutral has gone bad. In this home, the power comes from above. The first things you would look for is your connections from up above or possibly a loose lug in the panel or if it comes from below, you may have a loose connection underground or also in the transformer pad or also a lug on the breaker goes bad. When this happens, your compliant is going to be that the lights are flickering on one side of the house, my dryer is not heating or my range quite well enough. If you loose a neutral, you could have a scenario that if you hit a switch in kitchen then the lights in the bedroom turn on or you go to the bedroom and the living room goes on. It shouldn’t happen that way with decent home and good wiring. The reason it is doing that is the neutral is looking for anything to go back on whether it is a ground or another neutral to find it path to Earth. If you have any concerns, give us a call. We do emergency 24-7 and we can take care of you!
