Gentlemen,
All excellent suggestions, thanks very much for offering them. Like that saying, "all of us are smarter than any one of us".
Yes, I also had the thought of using a drop light with a lamp flasher button in it. Or buying one of those cool Etcon load flashers.
Something simple that I'm going to try, is to do it by measuring voltage. I'll make sure every circuit has a load on it (a light, for instance), and then cut power at each breaker, one at a time, and measure voltage from the breaker terminal to ground. A lot easier than measuring current, eh?
For instance, breakers 1 and 2 supply an Edison circuit, and being properly wired, are on phases A and B respectively. Because both halves of the circuit have a load, if I open breaker 1, I should measure some voltage to ground at the load side of that breaker. The volatge originates from the half of the multiwire circuit fed by breaker 2, and is being backfed through the loads.
This is a variation of the suggestion to lift the ungrounded conductors and measure continuity. I suppose just opening the breaker and then measuring continuity would work, as well.
What made me think of this is the time I had a service call where the lights in the dining room of a house only worked (and only dimly) when the electric oven was on! The residents thought that the place was haunted; the lights would go on and off at random, too.
They'd lost one leg of the service, and when the oven was on, it backfed the dead pole so the the lights on that leg would light dimly. It was funny, they hadn't noticed that many of the receptacle outlets were dead...and the lights going on and off was when the oven reached temp and the element was cycling to maintain heat.
I'll report back after I've tried this.
Thanks again,
Cliff
[This message has been edited by amp-man (edited 03-03-2005).]
