Part of home electrical system shuts down

[Andre Courchesne - Consultant]

Hi,

I have a very weired problam at my house. This is not a new house, it was built in 1960, but most part of the electrical system was redone about 10 years ago.

Once in a while, part of the electrical system shuts-down. When I mean part it is about half of the circuits. I could not find any logic in the circuits that shuts down or the one that keep alive.

The shut down lasts between 5 and 15 minutes and everything comes back to life...

I changed a few breakers in the hope it would do something and I also re-tighted all live and neutral in the master box but this did not change anything.

Tomorrow night I will have a UPS connected to my PC with a monitoring software to see what the AC line is doing but I have no clues.

Any ideas anyone?

Andre

P.S. You can e-mail directly to me.

[Speedy Jim]

You may want to enlist the aid of the serving utility; it's just possible that one "phase" has an intermittent connection. Even if it's on your equipment, they may help you locate it.

Jim

[CBHvac]

First..not to try to sound like another contractor, screaming GET AN ELECTRICIAN in there.....but..

We had a situation similar to this not long ago on a unit...and it was so unreal we missed it till it about knocked one of our guys on his ass..

It was due to a line that had burned in half...and was actually going to ground. It tripped the breaker for a while, and the homeowner went to a larger breaker...for whatever reason, that stopped the tripping, but the unit would run for about 20 minutes and shut off, no matter what. When we got there, we found the connector where the electrical entered the unit was shorted to the wires, and the wires had burned in half..sometimes making contact and sometimes not.

You MIGHT have a bad connection in a J box at somepoint and it MIGHT be in a condition that COULD be detrimental to your home. Get it checked...soon.

[Gary Tait]

In that case, if you have any 240V appliances on, they will "bridge" from the live leg, to the dead one, providing some voltage.

[Andre Courchesne - Consultant]

I did a visual check of the outside cabling tonight and did not see anything out of the ordinary...

I am now proceeding to verify all outlets and switches on the circuits that get affacted.

What I really don't understand is how lets say breaker 10 and 14 are affected but 12, 13 and 15 keep going like there was nothing wrong (those 5 breakers are all 110v)...

Andre

[the_plumber]

s how lets say breaker 10 and 14 are

What I really don't understand is -why- you would have a conversation with retardo boy - mark Ransley?

[mark Ransley]

A FREE check ,, and FREE, advise , and possibly a FREE fix, and the Security you have from the Elec Co is worth it , and its FREE I could not SEE my problem ,, Nor could my Elec co ,,, Till they were up on the wires, and it was Free ,,,,,,,, call your elec co. tonight

[meirman]

In alt.home.repair on 5 Aug 2003 16:59:23 -0700 [e-mail] (Andre Courchesne - Consultant) posted:

Assuming Canada is like the US, the only oddity is number 12. The even breakers are on one phase, and the odd breakers are on the other phase, so check your other odd and even to see if they keep up the pattern.

Wait. YOu say "lets say" so we don't know if 12 is good or not.

Meirman

If emailing, please let me know whether or not you are posting the same letter.

Change domain to erols.com, if necessary.

[Richard J Kinch]

No. You're wading out past the shoreline of your intuition. Time to call the utility and/or an electrician.

[Gary Tait]

Canada is different, where they use Federal Stab-Lok panels, where adjacent breakers can be on the same leg.