Have you ever

[billdozier]

Went on the craziest service call Ive ever been on. Customer called saying that whenever he plugged vacum in bedroom #4 the smoke in bedroom hall on other side of house would go off. It was the same circuit. We plugged vacum in and sure enough smoke went off. It was the only smoke that went off. We dopped the smoke and changed it out. Installed new smoke problem went away. We figure it must have been internal to smoke. Have you guys ever encountered this? Also what is the craziest service call you have ever done? Thanks

 

[cowboyjwc]

Went to a condo and the lady starts taking me through the place. She turns on the tv in the bedroom then goes in and turns on the bathroom light and the tv goes off. Turns on the lights in the kitchen and the exhaust fan over the stove turns on. Turns on the exhaust fan in the hall bath and the living room tv turned on.

I had her take me to her main service and checked it and I told her that the main breaker had gone bad and only one side of it was working. she was stunned that it only took me ten minutes to figure it out.

I told her not to be too impressed, because about a month before I had spent three days tearing apart my own house trying to figure out the same problem.:smile: Saved her a bunch of money.

 

[Podagrower]

Very similar bad main problem. Five ton ac compressor went bad and tripped the main. Problems were, it was a 300 amp service (twin 150 mains) and since only one tripped, lots of things still worked. The main that tripped was faulty as well, and one leg was still feeding through. Almost all 120v items still worked, until the dead leg (backfed through the water heater) became overloaded, then the items on that leg got very dim, or stopped working.

Not real difficult to troubleshoot, but add a drunk customer who thinks he knows about electricity (and who suggests we just reset the breaker without finding the reason it tripped) and you can eat up some time very fast.

 

[LarryFine]

Went to a condo and the lady starts taking me through the place. She turns on the tv in the bedroom then goes in and turns on the bathroom light and the tv goes off. Turns on the lights in the kitchen and the exhaust fan over the stove turns on. Turns on the exhaust fan in the hall bath and the living room tv turned on.

Sounds like an episode or two of The Three Stooges I remember, as well as various cartoons. :smile:

 

[ptonsparky]

Had a call to new house we had wired about 7 months prior. One of the smokes was chirping and she could not find which one. From the ground floor it sounded like it was in the basement. Got to the basement and it sounded more like it was upstairs. After a few trips up & down I asked what kind of smoke detectors did she have in her old house and what did she do with them. It was in a box on one of the basement shelves. Battery was finally getting low. She laughed and paid the bill.

 

[kbsparky]

New modular house, so each half is wired independently.

Plugged in vacuum in back bedroom, front BR breaker trips. Vacuum still works in back BR, no power in front BR. :-?

If you plugged in vacuum in front BR, it works just fine.

Yes, these were AFI breakers.

After tearing apart numerous outlets, switches, etc. and finding nothing wrong with the wiring itself, we finally installed some new AFI breakers. Problem solved.

 

[Greg Swartz]

Went on the craziest service call Ive ever been on. Customer called saying that whenever he plugged vacum in bedroom #4 the smoke in bedroom hall on other side of house would go off. It was the same circuit. We plugged vacum in and sure enough smoke went off. It was the only smoke that went off. We dopped the smoke and changed it out. Installed new smoke problem went away. We figure it must have been internal to smoke. Have you guys ever encountered this? Also what is the craziest service call you have ever done? Thanks

For my electrical engineering degree, we created a smoke detector remote vocal alarm... (a story in and of itself...)

Anyway, I had 3 resi smokes hooked up in parallel. We used them to test the remote unit, and we constantly tested them...
So, one night, the cleaning crew comes in, plugs in the vacuum, and the smoke detector starts chirping.
They stop, walk away, the smoke stops chirping.
So, they try another outlet (different room, adjacent to the room, opposite side, but same wall... so, same circuit)... plug vacuum in, smokes start chirping...

I guess I can understand the OP, but I was unable to locate the problem, aside from a surge in ampacity causing low voltage.

But all in all, it was funny to watch.

Everytime we set those things off, the class next door would pick up their stuff...
Since they are college students, they did figure out that we were the problem!!! :grin:

Oh, those were the days... wait a minute, that was 4 months ago!

 

[zappy]

Went to a condo and the lady starts taking me through the place. She turns on the tv in the bedroom then goes in and turns on the bathroom light and the tv goes off. Turns on the lights in the kitchen and the exhaust fan over the stove turns on. Turns on the exhaust fan in the hall bath and the living room tv turned on.

I had her take me to her main service and checked it and I told her that the main breaker had gone bad and only one side of it was working. she was stunned that it only took me ten minutes to figure it out.

I told her not to be too impressed, because about a month before I had spent three days tearing apart my own house trying to figure out the same problem.:smile: Saved her a bunch of money.

Can you explain why that would cause those problems??

 

[brantmacga]

Can you explain why that would cause those problems??

i'd like to know as well.


some 240v appliance would most certainly be bridging the two lines together, but i don't see how the link could exist to do what was said w/o causing a line-to-line fault under normal operating conditions.

 

[Fulthrotl]

I had her take me to her main service and checked it and I told her that the main breaker had gone bad and only one side of it was working. she was stunned that it only took me ten minutes to figure it out.

or the reverse, where you turn the main off, and one leg stays hot... i've had
that happen..... :-(

 

[cowboyjwc]

Can you explain why that would cause those problems??

The best I could figure was that since the load was so imbalanced the excess was going back through the neutrals and any thing with a built in switch or electronics was affected

 

[aline]

Went on a call where the homeowner had an AFCI breaker intermittently tripping.
Using test equipment I couldn't find any problems with the circuit. Tried plugging things into the outlets and turning them on to see if the breaker would trip. Still nothing. Removed the receptacles and switches looking for any signs of a problem that might cause the AFCI breaker to intermittently trip. Still found nothing.

About that time the wife comes home from work. She's in the military. She takes her dog tags off and hangs them on the vanity light (like the one pictured below) in the master bathroom. Sure enough the AFCI breaker trips. The dog tags would slip down onto the outer shell of the bulb making contact with the outer shell and the grounded metal casing of the light fixture. It's a good thing I was still there when she came home and did this.

 

[drbond24]

For my electrical engineering degree, we created a smoke detector remote vocal alarm... (a story in and of itself...)

Anyway, I had 3 resi smokes hooked up in parallel. We used them to test the remote unit, and we constantly tested them...
So, one night, the cleaning crew comes in, plugs in the vacuum, and the smoke detector starts chirping.
They stop, walk away, the smoke stops chirping.
So, they try another outlet (different room, adjacent to the room, opposite side, but same wall... so, same circuit)... plug vacuum in, smokes start chirping...

I guess I can understand the OP, but I was unable to locate the problem, aside from a surge in ampacity causing low voltage.

But all in all, it was funny to watch.

Everytime we set those things off, the class next door would pick up their stuff...
Since they are college students, they did figure out that we were the problem!!! :grin:

Oh, those were the days... wait a minute, that was 4 months ago!

In one of my engineering classes, the professor told a story about one of the guys that had taken the same class the semester before us. This guy was a member of the volunteer fire department and carried a beeper so they could summon him when he was needed. The professor managed to build a transmitter at the right frequency to set off this guy's beeper. Apparently they would set it off just to see him run out the door every day.

 

[bullheimer]

afci's take the cake.

had one on a new circuit trip cause a hot from a switch that wasn't even installed was next to a hot from a different circuit in the same box. all the insulatioin was still on both wires. separated them and it quit tripping.

new house i wired. every time i turned on the whole house fan on a completely different circuit it would trip the bedroom afci bkr. really weird, then i separated the home runs in the attic and it started tripping as soon as you turned a light on in the room, then it started not staying on. i switched breakers with another one and it did the same thing both times as the first one. i finally, because the room didn't have a closet inside the room, labeled the room as an office and put in a regular breaker. problem solved. i still have no idea why it tripped. i hate afci breakers. i am VERY THANKFUL the state of washington state code eliminated the requirement for afci bkrs on the whole house!!!!! i have started to never staple a cable on an afci circuit over the top of another circuit and try to keep the cables as seperated from themselves and others as possible. have not had any trouble with them since. ugh!!! i'd like to find the guy who invented these things and ......

 

[ishium 80439]

I don't know that this counts as crazy but it was memorable. We went to do a service change on residence. Meter outside, MB panel in the basement. We were doing all of our prep work and got ready to kill the power. The journeyman pulled the meter and the we noticed through the window that there were still lights on in the basement.

Long story short we found that someone who owned this house in the past had tapped off of the drop before the meter and installed a small panel to power miscellaneous items. It had obviously been there for many years and the current HO had no idea (maybe he wouldn't have been so eager to upgrade if he knew his electric bill was going to go up!).

 

[billsnuff]

say what....

say what....

neighbors calls, says elec dryer quit, so i grab belt and walk over. 2 60A range type boxes for house and garage. do some checking, lost one leg. check fuses and powder is falling out, too much heat and moisture.

changes several fuses, clean frankenstein switch for dryer, good to go. Tell him about hazards and offer a good price to upgrade.

Next week, someoneelse is installing new service, 500 for labor HO buys parts.

Two weeks later he has a new dryer delivered. that weekend he calls and says dryer won.t work. I grab belt and walk over. Nice new panel, new 2 pole brkr for dryer wired to frankenstein switch. shut off breaker and clean switch, dryer works. HO looks at me and syas, "I probably didn't need a new dryer, did I?"

Guess installer couldn't 10 ft of wire or a junction box.

 

[Alwaysready]

not electrical but when i was in the satellite business, i had a customer call me out on a service call for picture going out.
whenever you would stand 2 feet in front and 2 feet to the left of the tv the picture would go out on the tv. i thought the guy was kidding me till i did it sure enough the picture would get fuzzy and go out.
this was from a satellite no rabbit ears or tv antenna.
Come to find out the satellite signal was split and run down stairs and there was another splitter right below the magic spot.
swapped out the splitter and all was good.

 

[cowboyjwc]

Went on one in a rural area one time. Several outlets weren't working in a bedroom in a house that we had just finished a few months before. Since it was fairly new I still had a pretty good idea of how we had run the outlets and couldn't for the life of me figure out why these three wouldn't be working. I climbed up in the attic and took a look around and when I came down the homeowner asked what I was looking for up there and I told her that sometimes mice or squirrels will get up in the attic and for some reason they like to chew on the cable, but I didn't find anything. I told her that I would have to open the wall and run a new line since I couldn't find what was wrong and she said fine. I punched the first hole, while she was standing there, about where I knew the fire block would be and laying there, stiff as a board, was a mouse and he had chewed through the cable. She was very interested in how I knew that mouse was there.

 

[LarryFine]

She was very interested in how I knew that mouse was there.

She's not the only one!

 

[LarryFine]

HO looks at me and syas, "I probably didn't need a new dryer, did I?"

I get that often, too, when the complaint is tumbling without heat.

That's when they learn they should troubleshoot before replacing stuff. :roll: