In ,
E. Robinson typed:
On Thu, 21 Jan 2016 15:14:52 -0500, Stormin Mormon wrote:

Ah, so you had a loose neutral, then? Or was it
some other problem?

Here's the somewhat hard to fathom explanation I gave in another post.


On Thu, 21 Jan 2016 05:40:15 -0800, TimR wrote:

You can trythis to confirm it..... without even removing the
panel.......

Turn off the main breaker.

Now try to turn on the bad breaker.

If it still does not catch even with the main off, the breaker is
definilty bad.


Ingenious. Simple and workable.

If the breaker is bad, there can still be something else wrong too.
Sometimes breakers wear out, sometimes they go bad for a reason.

That is the kind of a.h.r advice I was looking for!

It worked perfectly!

In fact, your approach worked so perfectly, that it, um, uh, er....
it SOLVED the problem!

Well, not exactly (it couldn't have solved the problem), but this is
what happened!

1. The "bad" breaker was in the off position.
2. Unfortunately, I didn't think to test it today (last tested 2 days
ago).
3. I went outside and turned the mains off.
4. I went to the breaker panel, and turned the "bad" breaker on.
5. It stayed in the on position!
6. I flipped it back and forth a few times.
7. It stayed in the on position!
8. I left it in the on position.
9. I went outside, and flipped the mains back on.
10. I had expected the "bad" circuit to trip.
11. Huh? It was still in the on position.
12. I flipped it back and forth a few times.
13. It worked perfectly fine.
14. I went upstairs, and turned each affected light on (one by one).
15. They *all* worked (one multi-bulb light had 1 of 5 bulbs burnt
out).
16. Maybe that one bulb caused the circuit to blow? Naaah.

I removed the one bad bulb, but, other than that, nothing (that I
know of)
has changed between now and two days ago (other than the rain
stopped, which
has been constant here in California the past few weeks).

I don't understand, but, somehow, that ingenious trick showed not only
that the circuit breaker was good, but, that the circuit, somehow,
is (at least now) also good.

Makes no sense, I agree.
But that's the data.
I will let you know if it trips again.

I just wanted to mention that the symptoms that you originally described are
no longer present, apparently as a result of you following the above steps.
But, as you indicated, that doesn't explain why the problem occurred in the
first place.

So, at this point, we don't really know what caused the original problem and
symptoms.

I had similar situation and set of symptoms once with the electrical panel
in a tenant occupied single family home. The complaint was that one of the
breakers would trip every once in a while and that the tenant would reset
the breaker and everything would be okay. Then, the current problem became
that she sometimes had problems getting the breaker to reset and finally she
was unable to get the breaker to reset at all. She also mentioned smelling
a faint odor of something burning near the panel (which I know was not one
of your symptoms).

I went there and, like you, I wasn't able to reset the breaker. I could
switch it to "off", but on reset, it would just trip again. And, like you,
I noticed a slight spark on one of my reset attempts. When I turned the
main breaker off, I could reset the problem breaker, and when I turned the
main power back on the problem breaker stayed on and everything worked.
But, I wasn't convinced that the problem was resolved even though the
breaker did reset and didn't trip.

So, I turned off the main power and I removed the breaker. That's when I
saw that the center terminal to which the breaker attaches was melted.

Apparently, there was some type of loose contact between the breaker and the
center terminal and it must have been causing some type of arcing that
heated up the terminal to the point that it melted.

What I did then was take that breaker completely out. I bought a new
breaker for that circuit but I moved the new breaker to a different position
in the panel box where it would connect to a perfectly good center terminal.
I put a snap-in cover plate in the space on the panel cover where the
original breaker had been located (I forget what they are called) to cover
the hole that was created by removing the original breaker.

That completely solved the problem and there has been no problem since then.

So, even though the symptoms that you experienced are now gone, you may want
to try unsnapping that breaker and one or two nearby and look to see what
the terminals underneath look like. Of course, turn the power off first and
be sure to use all of the necessary precautions regarding any part of the
panel that may still be live even with the main circuit breaker off.

Maybe your problem is now fixed, or maybe you will see evidence of arcing
and burning where the breaker contacts the center terminal.

It is worth a look just in case.