My house has been plagued by dimming lights for quite a while and finally yesterday I decided to explore the situation and came up with some results that have me stymied. I put a voltmeter into the various outlets throughout the house and saw that the voltage would read at
118v for a while and then would suddenly shift to reading 127v. When this happened the lights in the room would either brighten or dim. This would alternate every few minutes.. I then went to my breaker panel and shut off my main breaker and checked the voltage situation on the lead in wires and saw that it was a steady 240 between tge two lead-ins but that the same instability occured between the individual leads and the ground/neutral.. (It would be 118 to ground and then shift to being 127 to ground every few minutes with the other wire reading the opposite at the same time). I went to a neighbor who comes off of the same transformer and asked him if he had the same light dimming problems and he said he hadn't noticed it but he said that his light bulbs were always burning out after just a short while... Anyway I am assuming that the problem is with the utility transformer but just wanted to know if this fluctuating current is typical of a bad transformer or could my ground connection possibly be causing this to happen... Thanks for your help. David- posted
18 years ago