I was called out to a troubleshoot job by my pal who is a plumber. He arrived on the site of a rental house (vacant now) yesterday to do some repairs because copper pipe in the plumbing system was cut and stolen. When he tried to turn the lights on in the basement all of the bulbs burned out. None of the receptacles upstairs were working and most of the lights in the house were very dim.
He called me today to come look at it. Strange things happening. First I made sure that no wires were cut from the main panel or the surrounding area. I opened the panel and tested the main; one side was about 80 v and the other 160v. I tested right off the main wires coming in also and then read 240 v and 120v to neutral. To make a long story short some of the breakers were reading the same voltages. After testing and testing and removing some wires from the panels from their breakers I was able to isolate 2 circuits that were causing the voltage to drop and give strange readings. Now I was able to get 120v and both sides of the main and on each of the breakers I left on. Turned off the ones that were giving strange readings. The ones that gave strange readings also caused the good ones to also give the same strange readings. Once I turned off the effected circuits had the proper readings of 120v on the breakers. Oh, also I had replaced the main breaker thinking at first it may have been the problem. Now that I isolated the bad circuits I pulled the breakers completely from the panel. I now get readings at the receptacles of 120v. However the strange thing is that when we plug in a power tool or anything else the voltage drops and the tool will not operate. The power tool humms and you can smell the motor starting to burn a bit. But with the tool plugged in the meter reads 120v on the same receptacle. I have never seen this before. At one point the circular saw worked but the blade turned very slowly and you could hear the motor laboring. I checked the meter socket power also. Getting full power to the house ffrom the service entrance from the pole. This is really purplexing me. I am almost ready to walk away from this job because I think there is some real problems in the wiring not knowing what the previous tenants may have done. Then when I reconnected one of the bad circuits it worked at 120v but another circuit that had read 120v is now reading something different.
Any ideas of what this may be?? Any thoughts or ideas would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks for your help
AFJES
