STRANGE TWIST OF IRONY!!!!!!!
Immediatley following the post of mine above, my friend calls, of whom I did a service for last week. He's smalling smoke, hearing a humming noise and the lights are doing the hoochy choochy. His drop was too short to make it to the new location so I left my side long and temp'ed to the original location. (POCO due to come out and replace, but hadn't yet...) So I drop dinking around on the internet and head over, after telling him to shut off the main.
So as I'm driving in the high winds and driven rain, I am keeping the fingers crossed that it is not one of my connections..... (Cause it sounds like a possible fire damage to at least something... 'cause of the smoke smell.) So I get there, (in ten minutes) and sure enough voltage fine with no load, radical voltage swing under load, 70 -160V. (I turned some expendable items on, on different phases to test.) Pull the meter and check it and main, solid! Pull out the ladder and cut power, cut my splices off, checked resistance in them, fine, time to call the POCO, as I'm looking at the pole connections I cant see anything in the mess thats up there. (More than a dozen drops on one pole) So as I'm waiting for the POCO for 4 hours we found what was burning.... The coffee maker element melted through the bottom of the coffee maker and set the surface of the butcher block table it was on on fire, and apparently extinguished itself. POCO arrives and up he goes in the bucket, and spots that the neutral/messanger had completly detached from a splice. (Yes, splice in messanger!) So he re-splices, the already taught messanger/neutral, and starts back down. "Hey, could you at least put a helical on the other side of the splice- that thing fails again and you'll be here with the fire dept next time..." - "What do mean, it'll hold." "The last one didn't, thats why we're here." So just to appease me, he does.
Damage report so far...
Coffee machine
Table it was on
Computer
Furnace control board
and 1 GFI, and 2 AFCI breakers
Phew!!!!
