I went on a service call the other night. It was for a local CPA office. A few receptacle replacements and a couple of bad ballast. As it was still light outside I decided to shut off them main breaker to do my repairs. All was well until I finished and went back to turn the main breaker back on. The main would not reset!! By now it was 7 pm. To top it off the main was an old
QO and had to be ordered. I think that was one of the most aggravating calls that i have ever made. Needless to say the temp
repair that i had to make would not have
passed anyones inspection, but when faced with a situation like that what would you all do? I took the line wires out of the main, used polaris connectors to go down to a smaller awg and back fed the panel through a smaller breaker. The service was 200 amp.

That was bad luck. Any reason not to use a tracer and shut off the branch CB's that were being serviced? If the main has not been "exercised" in a while, there is always the possibility of not resetting. Did the new replacement main CB work out for you?

Yes the new one worked out fine. as far ar
the tracer goes, i guess you have to know this building. there can be 4 receptacles in one room and they would all be on a
different circuit.

Kyme,

Sound like your temp repair was perfect in this instance. Good job

I've had mains on houses not reset a couple of times, usually just like your service call, at the end of the day and I had someplace important to go. Murphy!!

Did they try to get out of paying for this? I have had several customers try and refuse to pay on these. However, after explaining that this stuff needs to be in good working order and could of failed on the Super Bowl or Christmas and that this was a convenient time to discover the problem, they have all came around.

I don’t turn off mains unless I have to now, but when they do fail I only take responsibility for fixing them. Some one else has to pay, they’re not broke just because I turned them off.

Sam