I’m standing there in the kitchen after dinner, trying to take a step back and look at everything fresh. It was productive and organizing but I don’t feel like I have made much headway in finding the problem. So I spent my afternoon going at this slowly and methodically, making a map of the circuit, what parts are affected, checking and rechecking voltages, and writing it all down so I can keep it all straight. Maybe also double check to make sure you've identified each box correctly as end, # of cables going in/out, etc. Once you have these facts you can take a stab at making a map that's consistent with the facts, logic puzzle style. How many middle boxes are there? You could start disconnecting hots (one at a time or incrementally) to see what parts of the circuit lose power. Not sure what the best way to trace circuits with since I'm not an electrician, but this is how I would do it as an engineer: Is there voltage on the neutral when the breaker is opened? That would rule out whether the neutral is getting the voltage from a different circuit due to a wiring error. This is why you can't treat neutrals as finger safe, etc, even though they are grounded conductors. Most devices will pull the neutral up in this situation even if they're off (and will show as 120V on high impedance voltage meter mode). I think 120V neutral implies that the neutral is disconnected from the subpanel but still connected through some device or other to a hot. Not finding anything obvious in outlet boxes, I start checking the junction boxes (with multiple switches) in the problem areas of house and don’t see anything obvious there either.īiggest issue is not being able to trace the branch of the circuit that is being wonky.Īny suggestions on where to go from here? I’m open to anything as I have been spending the last 3 evenings trying to troubleshoot this issue, and not sure I have made any progress so far. (Could a bad outlet with an open neutral affect outlets upstream?). Starting with the outlets on the non-working branch, both outlets were ends of the line with nothing downstream of said outlets. This leads me to think open ground somewhere upstream of that circuit - either a bad outlet or possibly loose neutral on a wire nut? I haven’t done any recent work in any of the junction boxes, so I can’t imagine a wire but worked it way loose (although I guess it could happen). I start from the initial problem spot and the microwave outlet was giving me weird voltage readings: After some investigation, only a branch of the circuit seems to be affected, not the entire circuit. No breakers were tripped and no obvious gfci outlet tripped. There have been additions to the house and some renovations as well, so the circuits aren’t run as logically as they would if it was a completely new electrical job.īack to the issue at hand. Also double checked all of the gfci outlets just in case.ĭisclaimer 1: We have only been in the house for about a year and a half, and the breaker label in the panel isn’t super accurate, so still working on mapping out all the circuits.ĭisclaimer 2: The service panel is in a converter garage. I checked the electrical panel and none of the circuit breakers were tripped. Over the weekend, our microwave went on the fritz and stopped working.
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