It will work IF you have another tandem breaker of the same capacity. Not terribly common unless you have electric heat or ?
/the outside of the house. My shop vac doesn't have enough ooomph
when the dryer is vented to the outside?
There MAY be L/N loads - many do not - and they will be minor.
Check at the panel.
before I go the HVAC route.
k wire going into the breaker gets hot. =A0Not just warm but downright hot.= =A0the cord off the dryer going into the outlet isn't warm at all. I don't= know if that points to the breaker or the partially shorted heating elemen= t.
pigtail the wire thats overheated, that is cut off the overheated wire to a location where its good, and use a wire nut to add a short section of wire to replace the bad overheated area.
I repair laminators for a living, they draw a lot of current and frequently develop overheated wires near a connection, puting that same wire under a new breaker will see the new breaker fail soon, because the wire is higher resistance and that causes it to heat, which will damage the new breaker
when the dryer is vented to the outside?
Ah. I'm not sure I've ever seen my dryer cord, but I have seen the stove cord.
Okay. Thanks.
There is a gizmo you can get. It's an arrow-head shaped nozzle, about 1/2" in diameter, for an air hose with exhaust ports pointing backwards.
You hook it up to your air compressor and feed it into the output end of your dryer exhaust.
Stand to the side or you'll get flocked.
I am lucky enough to be cursed with electric baseboard heat and have other 30 AMP breakers to try. I'll let you know.
I have never seen a dryer with a 240v motor. (not GE, Whirlpool and all of the sub brands they own) They all have 120v motors.
Unless it is a european "universal market" unit. Not common in North America - but they do exist.
That said, the motor is 1/4 to 1/3 HP to maximum 300 watts, out of about 4500 watts total. So still relatively minor.
300 watts is 2.,5 amps more on one leg, that is a significant number. Then you add the timer and any lights.
There's a possibility that the breaker controlling the dryer is old and needs to be replaced. Breakers are electromagnetic or heat latches. When too much current flows through the electromagnet or the bimetal strip, it causes a latch to snap, causing the circuit to shut down. The latch can wear down, causing it to trip more often. So, the easiest and cheapest thing to do is to replace the breaker with one with an IDENTICAL rating. If it still trips, the problem is in the dryer.
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One of the most important points is making sure the connection is clean, strong, and TIGHT. Aluminum wiring, especially, can loosen, which causes a resistance, causing the wire to get hot.
Here's a section about problems with aluminum wires:
Electronic timer draws les than 100ma and the light is not on when it is running. 2.5 amps is [perhaps significant on a 15 amp circuit , not on a 30. 300 out of 2250 on one side is still only 14%. And the motor only draws 300 watts under full load. Likely less than 100 with an empty drum or light load.
Nothing wrong with aluminum wire itself - just rquires more attention to detail and proper technique
I have 3 30A double-pole breakers. No electric heat. Dryer and built-in cooktop & oven (separate circuits).
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Except that it is so difficult to work with that a lot of fire insurers won't insure homes with aluminum wiring. You have to use special connectors in order to be sure that the aluminum connections don't work loose and cause a fire hazard.
The aluminum wire problem was caused by steel binding screws in regular 15 and 20 amp devices (regular switches and receptacles) There was never a problem in lugs like you usually find on breakers and range/dryer receptacles and the 8ga aluminum wire you will be using. Actually the "aluminum" problem was fixed with the introduction of the AA-8000 alloy and the CO/ALR devices that use a brass screw. That more closely matches the thermal expansion rate of aluminum so they don't loosen up. The fact is, you could wire a house tomorrow with aluminum wire and it would be totally NEC compliant as long as you used the new materials. A lot of hype has come up around this and most of it is not true.
I think all the houses that were going to burn down, already did. Workmanship seems to have been a major factor. A lot of the problems trace back to homeowner work. There are still millions of houses out there with the original aluminum and they are doing fine (my ex is in one and the house across the street is another). I did a cursory inspection of the house across the street from me when they were renovating and I really could not find anything that looked like it got hot. I still advised that they get rid of as much aluminum as they could but the "flipper" said it was too expensive.
I agree the best fix in the Copalum retrofit or the Alumiconn but if I still lived in an aluminum house I think I would just go with CO/ALR devices and the goo. Replace all the wirenuts with Alumicons or Ideal
65s if box fill is a problem.I have also never seen an evaluation of the spec grade devices with the clamp plate. I bet they would work fine.
This is really being driven by insurance companies these days. Citizens, the company of last resort here, will not insure an aluminum house. It is hard to find any other company that will write windstrorm so a lot of people are stuck. I am curious how the guy across the street will make out. Any decent home inspector will freak when he sees the aluminum.
I agree that steel screws were a big problem.
And I agree that the problem was with 15 and 20 amp circuits.
One aluminum problem is higher expansion rate of aluminum causing extruding of wire in a connection, resulting in successively looser connection. You have written that the new alloy wire is harder and not likely to extrude.
Another problem is the thin insulating oxide that very rapidly forms on the aluminum surface. That is still a problem with the new alloy. You can wind up with a small contact area. In some tests the oxide prevented wire-to-wire contact in wire nuts. The contact was through the spring in the wire nut, which was not intended to be a conductor. With high current, a few turns of the spring can get red hot causing failure of the wire nut and connection. The fix is to abrade the wire to remove the oxide and apply antioxide paste.
The best connections appear to be
A rather small percentage of houses that have aluminum have the new alloy. You can still have problems with CO/ALR devices and old technology wire. Or even the new technology wire.
But there were fires. And connection failures at a much higher rate than copper.
The CPSC funded extensive testing of aluminum connections, which found enough problems that the CPSC appears to have been headed for a recall, which would have been enormously expensive. In the inevitable court case wiring was ruled to not be a consumer product and thus not under the purview of the CPSC.
The professional engineer who did the tests for the CPSC has recommendations at
You put your ex in a house that will burn down?
Good move, dude.
Her choice, I wanted to sell the dump.
The reality is, there has been no problem with the wire since 1971
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