"J.A. Michel" wrote in message
...
Circuits on the same hot leg should not be sharing a netural. You have
tandem breakers (which are on the same phase or hot leg) which are sharing
a netrual.

Shared netruals are OK in a multi-wire curcuit, which uses both hot legs
(one for each 120V circuit) and share a neutral.

Get them split up and off the same hot leg.



"Fpbear II" wrote in message
. net...
I noticed that some appliances were running better when plugged into
certain outlets. I am wondering what could cause the voltage difference.
This is in a room where the previous owner installed four GFCI outlets
coming from a dedicated subpanel. The measurements (with some loads still
present) a

Pair 1:
134V outlet A
110V outlet B

Pair 2:
113V outlet C
127V outlet D

I took off the face plates. The two pairs of outlets have a shared
neutral, i.e. one white wire comes down from the wall and goes into both
outlets. The other two wires in each outlet pair have the separate hots..
red wire goes into the hot in one outlet and black wire goes into the hot
in the other outlet.

I also took off the subpanel cover. Here is a picture with the wires
clearly shown. It looks like each outlet has its own breaker:

http://www.statuaryplace.com/images/insidesubpanel.jpg

The subpanel conduit goes all the way to the main service panel and I'm
not sure where it connects at the service panel. The house was built in
1950 so the rest of the electrical is pretty old, but it this subpanel
appears to be independent of the old wiring.

I am wondering if it might be a mis-wiring at one of the outlets or
something simple that I can fix myself. I have done a lot of electrical
work at the previous house but I am not familiar with shared neutral
circuits.

Thanks!!



From all your described symptoms, there is no doubt that you have a poor
connection somewhere in the neutral line. It can be anywhere from the power
pole, down thru the meter socket, and into the main and sub panels. To
determine where the problem is, you have to see how far back toward the pole
the problem shows up. Each side of the system should have approximately the
same voltage to the neutral and the neutral to ground voltage should be near
zero. A few volts of difference is not significant but as much as 5 is not
normal.

Don Young

This is a serious problem and if you do not feel competent to solve it you
should seek help from someone with more experience.