When I'm not busy making up flawed strategies for replacing my basement support post, I sometimes do electrical wiring. =8-o
This morning I received a call from a friend who was attempting to replace some of the in-wall blower heaters in his new condo. He was quite frantic, as he had just given himself a nasty shock despite having turned off the "heater" breakers in his panel. So I loaded up my rigging bag with tools and headed on over.
Upon inspecting the heater, I found a broken ground wire with a melted end, and a scorch on the pergo floor. It appears that my friend had (probably) contacted a live wire, and pushed it into the ground wire. This earned him a burn on his finger and a hand covered with soot from burned insulation. Lucky for him it was a 110 volt shock, and not the full 220.
I introduced my friend to my handy circuit checker (I gave him my spare), and had him turn off the circuit. He turned off the pair of (non-ganged!) 20 amp breakers for the living room heaters, and I checked the wires. Sure enough. . .one of the supply wires was dead, but the other was still live.
I had my friend turn off random breakers until the second wire went dead. Not surprisingly, the second wire was fed by the breaker for a heater circuit that was _supposed_ to be for another room. So the two living room heaters (wired in parallel) require three separate breakers to disable their 220v supply.
My friend has promised to hire a professional electrician to sort this one out.
-Mark