Challenger Contactor - unknown if original configuration

[hillbilly1]

Westinghouse A200 contactor, since Challenger was a part of Westinghouse they rebranded a lot of Westinghouse components as Challenger.

I knew I had seen them somewhere as another brand!

 

[Llortus]

I feel I owe you some information of what was actually found.
As found condition had 240V at bottom of fuses (when switch was closed), mechanically activating the Challenger relay caused the double pole 20A breaker to trip. All lighting circuits had two hots (red/blue or red/black) and a green ground run in conduits.

The building has neutral and grounding bars in many of the wire trays and spice boxes, will admit my inexperience in that this was my first exposure to such a configuration. I did not check if neutral bars were isolated or grounded.

I traced the conduits and found panel fed 4 light circuits; Bay Lights and Wall Pack 1, 2, & 3. I checked resistance for all the lighting circuits and while none had high resistance the bay lights had surprisingly low resistance, as most of my experience is dealing with open wire circuits 45' in air, I reset the breaker and with all other lighting circuits disconnected, closed into the fault. I found a junction box that let me split the bay lights in half and was able to use resistance to identify faulted half and then locate the shorted fixture.

Owner only wanted high bay lights working so I removed all the previous wiring in panel and connected the high bay lights below the fuses.

The other wires got wire nutted and labeled behind a closed panel.

When a traced the control wires I followed them to a junction box that looked like a porcupine with wire nut quills. I did not venture further.

I suspect that both relays are perfectly fine since shorted ballast is was root cause. I couldn't tell the coil voltage on the GE relay unless Chat GPT was correct that it was 24VAC; saw now transformers in nearby wire trays. Have plans for next trip to warehouse that we will install a bank of switches to control the lighting circuits.

 

[Mr. Serious]

Chat GPT makes things up, especially regarding technical subjects. It's most likely that is a 120v coil.