Originally Posted by DanaK

Hi people,

Sorry I haven't been around to answer. I'm not ignoring anyone, we've been on vacation with my daughter's senior class and our heads are still buzzing. Just got in last night. The dog was sure we'd abandoned her and we've had about a foot of rain and ten feet of lightning and a tornado or two in the area this past week so we've got some cleaning up to do around here. No damage, thank God.

The longer these threads get the more difficult it is to make sense out of who's answering whom and to what question. There has been a lot of good and interesting information posted and I'm going to glean as much as I can from the posts and copy and paste them into a more permanent reference file for my future referance.

However, given the numerous times three phase has been explained to me in the past, both in classes and in impromptu training, and seeing the differing views of it here it's no wonder my brain rejected what I'd been told out of confusion long ago. I do remember the "wye" configuration and that there was a second type of configuration in some motors but I've forgotten that one.

I have retained a very vivid object lesson from long ago, however: NEVER check the resistance between two legs on a live 3 phase circuit!! It was toward the end of a long shift and I was trouble shooting a large dryer we had in the laundry of our hospital and I didn't switch from ohms to voltage on the little nickel and dime volt meter we had. Talk about a firecracker going off in your hand! That was tons of fun ....

I will double check the guage size on the wire since I had to open the wall up to trace it out to the breaker. I'm pretty sure it's at least a 10 ga. stranded wire.

I guess someone read my post about the voltage I was getting between the legs in the breaker box - ~243vac.

"the fan" that seems to have a few people scratching their heads: I was in a hurry trying to type in as much detail as possible at the beginning of this thread. The fan I made reference to is the fan in the A/C unit itself. The stove is an old electric range in the house that runs off both legs supplied to the house and probably an early 60's vintage unit. No fan in it, just the A/C unit. I'd been guessing that the fan in the A/C unit was the only part that had actually been working since I thought the A/C unit had had a lower voltage supplied to it than it was rated or built for. I was also afraid that, due to the lower voltage, the compressor and other high voltage sections of the unit may have burned out but now I'm thinking the unit itself is fine so I'm going to replace the breaker set - and wire if I need to.

Thanks once again,
Dana