Odd household voltages

Classic of houses wired by our enemies who put in those ground outlets but never bothered to connect them to safety ground. That 50 volts could be leakages from appliances. Clearly there is a major safety problem involving the neutral and ground connections. First verify that safety grounds even exist all the way into and connected to the breaker box bus bar.

Furthermore, voltages should be closer to 120 VAC.

sjb wrote:

Yes, they are 120V...just a slip on my part. Old school...my dad used to refer to voltages as 110 and 220. And yes, everything that I've checked so far has grounds made up and the panel looks good.

What do you mean by "leakage" from an appliance? Also, why would it manifest itself on the neutral?

Thanks for your input...

Without reading your entire, post, I'd say that you have an open neutral wire either between the breaker box to the ground rod or between the breaker box and the ground rod and the neutral wire that goes out to the power pole.

Yeah, I was talking with my neighbor who is an electrician and he told me basically the same thing...I just thought it confusing that some outlets read correct voltages. I'll check it out on Wednesday and let you all know the result (if your interested that is) :>) Thanks for all the input...it all is hopefully pointing in the right direction.

Scott

A neighbor called me over to look at a do-it-yourself wiring job that he had goofed up. A bedroom was originally equipped with a switched outlet. A single piece of romex ran between the outlet box and the switch. The black was the hot and the white was used for the switched hot return to the outlet. So far, so good (except that the original electrician hand't marked the white switched leg as being hot).

My neighbor crawled up into his attic and installed a ceiling light fixture. He fished a piece of romex down into the switch and connected it to the black and white wires of the existing romex. Now, when the switch was 'off', the (existing) floor lamp was at full brightness. Switch it 'on and both lamps (floor and ceiling) glowed dimly.

The moral to this story is that; if anyone has been working on this before you got there, there could be many strange things buried in those walls.

-------- This reminds me of the situation I once had. After having normal operation of all lights, I ran into a situation where the lights, in the row house I was renting at the time, would get dimmer as I turned on more of them. I traced this to an (inadequate even in 1955) fuse box and found that a fuse was blown but a 240V water heater shared the fuse so with the fuse blown, the lights were in series with the water heater. I later investigated another place where the voltages were unbalanced and the unbalance depended on load. This case was due to a poor neutral connection.

A later situation, in examining a control panel at a small power plant, I found that the best process (as a new engineer) was to get under it and draw what was actually there. Modifications and changes meant that the "official" drawings bore only a cursory relationship to the actual situation and were completely untrustworthy. In this case an engineer getting dirty was a novelty to the plant operators- that was a shame.

Check that the neutral and ground is tied together in the box. Modern boxes have links that can be reomved if it is used as a sub panel. It should be in place if this is usedas a main panel.

Hi all,

Well, if any of you are interested in my solution, here it is...

1) I went to the panel as many suggested and looked for a bad N-G bond...none found. I did however find a loose gnd wire (actually just hanging there) which led me to believe that I had solved the problem....NOPE! It was for a different ckt. I was rather confused at the possibility that the bond would cause only some outlets to be incorrect while other were fine.

2) I proceeded to test outlets to trace ckts....Oh, boy! What a cluster...the guy had 3 ckts running into one bedroom. Some of which in turn powered the fridge and some outlets in the dinning room, and kitchen. I couldn't get a consistant reading on the recepticals using my circuit tester...still getting approx. 75V on the N-G readings. So I drop back to punt...I start to disconnect ALL the outlets from the wiring so that I can start tracing wires. Lo and behold, I notice that the grounds (which looked to be made up alright with a a wire nut) actually were not twisted together and some ground wires would just fall out of the nut! Since I had all the outlets out, and they had been painted over serveral times, I decicded to install new ones making secure ground connections with crimps. Voila' Everything is working normally.

Bottom line...I think that some of the outlets were worn out and broke the neutral (and some grounds).

Thanks to all of you for your great advice!

Scott

--------- In this case it is your perseverance and testing along with your approach to fixing the problem that did the trick. However, you may still have a problem with lousy circuit routing and loading. At least you can now map your circuits and possibly mark the outlets as to which circuit breakers they are on.