"John McGaw" wrote in message
. ..
RBM wrote:
You are correct. None of the 240 volt stuff will work, and half of the
120
volt stuff will work
"John McGaw" wrote in message
...
RBM wrote:
If he's measuring between the "two hot wires" he should read 240 volts
regardless if his neutral is intact or not. The only reason he would
get
anything less would be one dead hot leg. When he reads between each
hot
leg to ground, he reads the good leg normally and the dead leg he gets
a
backfeed reading through any 240 volt appliance that happens to be
turned
on. Both will give a 120 volt reading.
"Joseph Meehan" wrote in message
...
Since you are getting 110 (should be 120 in most areas) I doubt if
it
is the power company. I suspect you have a floating neutral and that
needs to be addressed as you cold end up with damaged electronics or
even a fire. (I had a boss once that burned down his photo studio
due
to one.)
However since I am not sure of exactly what you are measuring and
how, I would suggest asking the power company to come out and make
sure
their end is OK first.
Note: If you have or can find an old analog volt meter rather
than
that digital, I suspect you will find that those 54 V measurements
will
become 0V. In fact if you go now and measure them again you might
get
something lower or higher this time. If so that is another
indication
of a floating neutral.
"ronaldo123" wrote in message
...
Hi all,
I have problem at home. Recently my oven, water heater, dryer....
stopped working. I tried playing with the breakers but it all seems
to be fine. One curious thing in the panel is that if I measure the
voltage between the 2 hot wires it reads 58volts... if I measure
each
of the hot wires to the ground it measures 110volts.. is this
normal?
Should the voltage between the 2 hotwires measure 220V ?
Thanks!
--
Joseph Meehan
Dia 's Muire duit
If it is truly an open hot leg then surely somewhere else in the house
there should be signs of some of the lights not working and some of the
outlets being dead. That is just the way the standard North American
split
240V system works. I won't pretend to know what it is that the OP is
actually measuring or how he is measuring it -- there are just too many
variables involved especially if he is using a DVM.
Personally, I would start measuring at the utility feed and then
through
the bus bars and forward but there is no way I will encourage a
non-experienced person to do what I would do. I learned to do much of
this
while I was still a teenager and credit my continued breathing to an
abundance of caution.
--
John McGaw
[Knoxville, TN, USA]
http://johnmcgaw.com
Actually, I got to thinking about what I wrote and started to wonder if
it is possible to get cross-feeding from one bus through some 240V
device into the other bus without enough odd behavior elsewhere in the
house to notice. I guess it is possible if one wasn't looking for the
symptoms. Probably the best thing to do would be to simply turn off all
of the 240V breakers in the panel to eliminate any potential
cross-feeding. If it was one dead bus then surely some of the lights and
outlets would go dead with all of these breakers turned off.
Has anyone ever seen a half-tripped service main breaker? I haven't, but
I've seen it in a few regular 240V ganged breakers and know that they
can cause some odd things to happen. It might be worthwhile to simply
turn off the main and then turn it back on.
I saw a half tripped main breaker many years ago. It was a Federal Pacific.
I shut it off and turned it back on again and everything was fine.