ECN Forum Forums General Topics of the Trade General Discussion Area You ever get one of these calls?

Bob,

Look for a bootleg neutral, they are found on a lot of basement jobs.

Trumpy, I donno but it blew a 8-10" hole in the wall and melted the guys drill, and the whole neighborhood went dark.... Kid described it a giant "Fireball". They said it came back on and did it again before I got there? Thats just what I figured..... When I got there the 1/0 Al cable was fused together at the end that had blown apart in the wall, FPE breaker, still on! It broke apart when I shut it off. ????????

Harold, I too have hit the high leg for a circuit. I put up a 120 exit sign on the blue phase, and it nearly caught fire. Put the meter on it and nearly beat my head on the wall. Customer standing right next to me.

OK, the red leg thing hit 1 of my guys once. He put a dedicated circ/outlet 120V/20A in a store we recently renovated for a water cooler. Cooler didn't work...store ordered a replacement, that didn't work either....3rd cooler smoked as soon as it was plugged in! Took about 30 seconds after I got the call to figure what the ?? was. Wound up paying for 1 cooler.

Les works in the same area as I basically, and yes the HO basements are nightmares. Had one that was 'wired' in orange extension cords & shallow gem boxes!

Also, had a 2 lamp, T12 mag ballast at 277 volt take out a 2000 amp 480 main Cb on Grd Fault; and a week later a 3HP 480 motor take out a 2k main in the adjacent bldg.

John

John,

The POCO did that to a friend of mine once. The service was disconnected and re-connected and the POCO mixed up which leg was the high leg. They took out SOO many ballasts in a large office building, I believe other things got ruined too. I just remember my friend spending the next 2-3 days replacing ballasts and bulbs etc.

One of my neighbors made an adapter plug to hook his RV up to a dryer receptacle.
Smoke city. The RV was 30a @ 120v.
They did sort of look the same tho