Several years ago I was summoned to a residence. The owner showed me that whenever she turned on the hall light the living room light would dim. When the refrigerator turned on the hall light would get brighter. Etc. Etc.
I checked everything out, tightened every terminal in the panel, tightened the grounding terminals, etc.
The problem turned out to be a broken neutral wire buried in the yard. Seems it was nicked when it was installed ten years before and gradually deterioated until it was open. Current evidently continued to flow through the ground and everything worked OK until we had a drought. The ground at the panel or the broken end of the neutral gave up and 220 volts were distributed throughout the house depending on the resistance of the circuits involved. This could have easily destroyed any electronic equipment or motors.
Moral, when a house seems possessed look for a bad neutral and a ground that lost its integrity.
The local power company replaced the service entrance cable and we made sure the earth stayed damp at the ground rod site. Case closed.
[This message has been edited by dturner (edited 03-02-2001).]
I typed in a mistake on that one! I was editing it when you must have posted your message, so after I fixed it, I saw your current message.
Don't change the way you understand an Ampere. You are correct. I made a mistake while typing the message out. Had a phone call while typing that part of the message out, and was bouncing between the call and the message.
It's fixed now, so go check it out again!
Sorry about that!!
Scott
Scott " 35 " Thompson Just Say NO To Green Eggs And Ham!
In order to measure voltage you are reading the potential between 2 different points. A voltage reading between a hot and a neutral will give you a voltage difference. Taking a reading between the neutral and the ground will be "0" because they are electrically connected or are the same point electrically. You have to have a difference of potential to have a voltage.
Thinking of it another way if you were to take a pressure reading in a water pipe and it was 150 PSI and you had another water pipe beside it that also had a pressure of 150 PSI what would be the difference in potential between them. 0 PSI
If you were to place your test leads on the hot conductor at the breaker and on the buss bar supplying that breaker the voltage would also be "0" because electrically they are the same point.
Not that I am advising doing this but if you were to disconnect the neutral wire from the neutral buss bar and take a reading between the neutral wire and the buss bar you would get a voltage reading. It may not be 110-120 because your meter would be in series with the load and the voltage could reflect that. The voltage is being conducted back to ground or back to the source (same place in this situation).
[This message has been edited by dturner (edited 03-02-2001).]
[This message has been edited by dturner (edited 03-02-2001).]
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