Electricians

Bonus:

Service call for a smoking main 200a breaker. Ended up shifting the entire bussing up to get fresh bus clips, covered the top of the bussing protruding beyond the backing with a comical amount of mastic, installed a new main breaker, and told the client they need to change that service yesterday. Old 80s/90s Crouse-Hinds, those mains are garbage.

Hello,

I'm trying to shop around for a possible extension cord for this 250v, 50amp outlet.

We'd be trying to use an electric dryer from this, but would preferably have it extend nearer a window on the other side of a garage (~25-30 ft, generous measurement). We'd likely pick up an older, used, basic dryer model, and not sure what those electrical needs will specifically be, but trying to plan ahead in case something needs to be altered.

This is the closest I've found which might work:

https://www.homedepot.com/p/VEVOR-Extension-Cord-25-ft-10-Wire-Gauge-Heavy-Duty-Outdoor-Welder-Extension-Cord-with-3-Prong-30-Amp-Power-Extension-HJLJQ10-3-25FTYCXV1/320761106

Most other cords with 3 prongs had them sort of curved/circular. Yet, this says only 30 amps.

Is there different or specific wording which might assist my search? Or would something like the above cord work for our situation?

Thank you for taking the time to read my post. I appreciate any advice or directions.

Hello,

Thank you for stopping to read my post.

I am trying to help my grandmother locate the breaker for a 250v outlet as she needs a new dryer in her house and is switching from gas to electric.

If the picture came through correctly, would anyone here have any suggestions on which of these might be connected to said outlet?

From what I could find online so far, it's supposedly one of the breakers with two switches attached together. I'm just not sure which, as the outlet itself says 50amps and none of these specifically list that number on (what I assume) is the amp amount marked on the switches. All the electrical at this house is so disorganized no one knows what's what right now (which I am definitely going to hire an electrician to remedy soon). And I also don't have anything to plug into the outlet to simply switch things on/off and see if power gets cut to it and she needs a dryer sooner than we'll be able to hire said electrician.

I'm hoping to test the outlet before getting her a dryer, as it just hasn't been use for almost 2 decades, which I read requires switching off the breaker for the outlet prior to connecting a multimeter but I'm limited on what I'm familiar with electrically, and money is extremely limited so trying to save her money by doing what I can before getting an electrician called in for anything significant.

Any advice, suggestions, or direction are greatly appreciated.

Either way, thank you again for taking the time.

I'm trying to wire Shelly 1PM gen 3 to my wall outlet. Is the diagram correct?

I was installing a TP-link HS210 3-way smart switch in my dinning room. On the side with the mains power I do have a neutral wire, but on the other switch I have no neutral wire from the wall (for that breaker). I do have a switch that's on the kitchen breaker right next to it, though, and that has a neutral and ground.

In my breaker box, both the neutral and grounds appear to be on the same row of lugs.

Running the neutral wire from the switch to the ground works, and I'm thinking it's because it's all going to the same place. This specific switch didn't explicitly say to do this, but other switches I've installed did.

Now, I could run the switch's neutral to the neutral on the kitchen circuit. I didn't at first because I had the other switch wired wrong, so I thought it was the no neutral switch causing issues.

I want tu buy a wind turbine from Aliexpress but im not sure how to build or how does the controllers work

What i can do? You know a tutorial or forum where i can find info of theses generators?

How can I bring this forward so the junction box is accessible?

Do I just get enough single gang extension rings to bring it out far enough to sit flush with the drywall?

Or do I add an access panel on the drywall?

I sold my hot tub 😢. We ended up just decoupling this conduit and cutting the line. I’d like some advice on the best way to simply cap these off in a way that doesn’t become a problem later when I move out.

Not an electrician, just hoping somebody is nice enough to help out.

The electrician who installed it basically “stole” the connection that goes to the garage to install this. I’m still not exactly sure what he did behind that box, but I think I’ll have to figure that one out later.

Any help appreciated!

Some of you may recall my previous post about a ~20V potential between my electrical ground and my concrete slab. That's still not resolved - it's currently sitting just under 10V.

Today I have a new mystery - to me anyway..

I'm sitting at my desk and notice that I got a tingle from the outer shield/shell of a USB-C cable. I got my multi-meter and measured 65V from the cable to me with my bare feet on the slab! It drops to about 16V if I lift my feet off the floor. I immediately assumed the charging brick it's plugged into was faulty, but just in case I took a more measurements and found that the another similar charger has a similar offset, the "ground" part of a TRS cable plugged into an amplifier is similar, the accessible metal shield part of a USB-A port on an ASUS ChromeBox is similar. I assume that's not normal?

This is a new slab on grade build. Ground and neutral are properly bonded - I checked a few outlets and ground to neutral is ~0.3V.

Edit - I don't think there is any safety risk - I measured 0.3μA current.

I live in a small community at the end of a long line in Atlantic Canada. We get frequent power disruptions so I have installed a backup generator. I have a bit of a home lab, and don't like my server to lose power with no warning so I've recently installed a small UPS to keep it running in the gap between my power going out and the generator starting. The UPS logs data and lets me access it.

I'm wondering if I should be concerned about my input voltage. The blue line in the minimum for the hour, the amber is maximum for the hour. The zero period on the 8th of March was when I had the power turned off to do some work.

The default configuration for my UPS has it cut over to battery power at 88V, so it seems some significant variation is expected!

I tried searching my power company web site but they don't seem to publish anything about guaranteed, or even expected, supply voltage.

The 2 best Youtube vids re electricity for me –

y2u.be/bHIhgxav9LY

y2u.be/oI_X2cMHNe0

Got my bachelor's degree in electrical engineering in 2015 and I didn’t know the energy flow and the surface charges that Derek explained. Maybe I didn’t listen close when my electromagnetism mentor taught Poynting vector. But no mentor of mine talked re surface charges. These wow me –

1. In the Poynting vector simulation, the energy flowed outside the wire, not in the wire.
2. The wire had a corner angle of π/2 but the energy flowed in a curved way.
3. The cross product of the electric and magnetic fields is the key thing. The electrons in the wire don’t carry the energy.
4. Energy can flow even if we don't have a loop of wire.
5. The 🔋 is the shepherd. The surface charges are the sheep dogs. The electrons are the 🐑. (The electric field accelerates the electrons.)
6. Ohm’s law, mesh analysis and nodal analysis are 👍 but don’t cover all the cases. You must use Maxwell’s equations if you want or need a high level of accuracy. You can use Ansys hfss for simulations with Maxwell's equations. I wonder if using quantum electrodynamics is better. Or no since we’re not dealing with a quantum system?

Location: USA:MN

To preface, I'm a refrigeration mechanic, so I only know just enough about three phase power to ~~get into trouble~~ hook things up and make sure they work.

I'm working on a large remodeling project in my home durring which I want to future proof as much as I can (because foam insulation makes changing things later a removed). I'm going the full 9 yards running conduit and everything. As part of that future proofing I am planning on upgrading my service from 100A to 200A. However, since I'm upgrading my service anyways, I am also strongly considering getting a three phase service. If I ever wanted to stick an electric car charger or other big piece of equipment in then a three phase connection would be handy to have. It also seems like the kind of upgrade I want to get done while the house is mostly gutted rather than trying to shoehorn it in later. So my questions are as follows.

1. Do I go with a 120/208V 4 wire service or a 120/240V 4 wire service? My provider offers both to residential customers in my area. There are additional restriction on the service drop for the 240V option. None of those appear to apply in my case but it might make 240V a bit more of a pain to get.

2. Do I need to worry about phase balance? Since this is for a single family home most of my power draw is going to still be 120V between a single phase and neutral. Obviously I want to split circuits up between the 3 phases to try to draw on them evenly, but it's never going to be split perfectly evenly. Is drawing on the phases unevenly going to cause any sort of issue?

3. Are there any other footguns to watch out for here? For example, is having three phase power going to mess with my home insurance rates or anything like that?

I've just had a new house built in Atlantic Canada. This morning I noticed a bit of a tingle from my coffee machine when I touched it with wet hands. The machine has a grounded (3 pin) plug and I checked - it has 0V between the parts I touched (the entire metal outer case) and the ground socket in the outlet. So, I got curious and did some more measurements. It turns out there is 20V AC (and about 300mV DC) between the ground in my outlets and me when I'm standing on my floor (sealed concrete slab) with bare feet.

I assume this isn't good?

I'll be calling the electrician that wired the house in the morning, but I'd appreciate any insights you might have.

I want to know what do you think?

What was probable cause?

Before that, for last 2-ish years I must replaced 5 LED bulbs.
No other symptoms.

Right before failure, one or two LED bulbs started blinking. I heard "scorching" sound.
And smell of burned electric/electronic (isolation).

Then I disconnected all circuits and opened all surrounding boxes...
Over-current breakers or RCD/GFCI didn't tripped.

Extra photos:

(ignore temporary jumper - fixed now)

I need to replace a faulty breaker. Here's a picture of my main breaker box. There's no master switch that I can see that shuts off power to all of the breakers.

Following the line up and out of the box, it runs along the basement ceiling and out through a hole in the foundation.

Let me know if you need to see something else.

Edit. Resolved! I found a master switch on the outside of the house in a panel adjacent to the meter. Weird that anyone can just walk up to my house and turn all of the power off.

Hello, I would like to identify this plug & socket in order to get replacement parts ! This comes from my electric cook-top from my apartment's kitchen. Obviously something when wrong... I suspect the plug got nudged loose when the handy-man came to replace the dishwasher, causing one contact to have poor connection, heat overtime and destroy itself. I noticed something was wrong because of the plastic smell when I was using the cook-top for a long time at high power.

The white plug was part of a cable with a Schuko on the other end, I cut it off. The black socket was part of the cook-top. Both were pretty much melted together at this point.

I have a GFCI in the garage that tripped and keeps tripping. I traced it to an outlet in the basement but there is something weird going on. I'm not an electrician, but I've done a bit of wiring, but I don't know how to interpret this.

In the picture is the basement outlet pulled apart and the power is on and the GFCI is reset and working. This basement outlet has 3 14/2 cables coming in. I think one is power from the garage, and the other two lead to outlets outside the house. I checked the wires until I found 120V and then marked them with yellow tape, which is what is shown in the image.

However, if I connect the multimeter to the black/yellow and one of the other whites I get a reading of 101.8, and the other white reads 0.7. This shouldn't be happening, right?

This is an outlet at my in-laws’ house which was built in the 1960s. I’m not sure if this is just some paint that was put on an outlet and has worn off over time or if this is some residual evidence of sparking/minor electrical fire. The walls are wood panels painted white, so it seems to me someone might’ve just thought they could paint the outlets as well (there are some parts of this basement that don’t have the wood painted and the outlets/switches are dark brown, which might be what I’m seeing). The outlet seems to work but I don’t feel totally comfortable plugging something more expensive like my laptop in, even though I suppose the charger would be more likely to die than the actual computer. The house has a fairly new electrical panel with breakers that seem nice, but it was also built initially as a duplex (with a later addition making it useable as a triplex) and each part has its own old sub-panel that still uses twist-in fuses. I’m still not sure if whoever put in the new panel said the rest of the wiring/outlets was fine or my father-in-law just decided upgrading the rest was too expensive.

Hello, I bought an electric fence kit for some goats and horses for a plot of land which requires grounded power outlet.

I wonder if a TT ground connection for the outlet (or fuse circuit the outlet belongs to) would suffice or if I need to redo the whole barns electrics since it's all ungrounded at the moment except for a 3 phase outlet connected to the garages electrics.

I just want to know what I should ask an electrician about when I ask for quote and time. If I need to redo the whole wiring I need to hold until next springto so I really hope for a smaller job :)

If I use wrong terminology Im sorry since English is not my first language

Can I put an additional load before switches on a dedicated circuit?

The example circuit goes from the service panel to a two-way (SPDT) switch at the house back door. From there the circuit goes to another two-way switch out in the garage. The circuit then powers the garage lights.

The goal is to add additional lights on this circuit near the service panel so that the same switches would also control the new lights.

How wrong would it be to add this new load between the service panel and the first two-way switch? This would save the (huge) effort to run wire from the garage back to the house.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.crimedad.work/post/55669

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.crimedad.work/post/55668

cross-posted from: https://pixelfed.crimedad.work/p/crimedad/664462779759271734

If you use enough electrical tape, that counts as a junction box, right?

I'm a hack myself, so I get it, but jeez. A wet application like a dishwasher installation really isn't the place for this sort of carelessness.

The second picture shows how I remotely open a circuit breaker.

This post is a follow to my previous dishwasher install post (https://pixelfed.crimedad.work/p/crimedad/664264701761318465).

#diy #dishwasher #linoleum #electrical

@crosspost@lemmy.crimedad.work

Sorry if this isn't the right community. I'm adding blinkers to a side-by-side and I have the blinkers working. However I can't understand how to connect the hazard switch to the blinkers without losing the blinker functionality. When I connect them it makes both blinkers go off when I try to use the blinkers. Is someone able to point me in the right direction? Thanks!

I’m wiring a type 2 surge protector and want to surface mount it on the drywall here with the cables going into the drywall and then into a breakout in the panel. What kind of conduit elbow can I get to hide the wires entering the drywall that will screw onto the threads on the surge protector? Thanks

Feel free to roast me if this is idiotic. Thank you!