Problem with main panel

[tallgirl]

Can anyone tell me what's wrong with this picture?

 

[iwire]

Can anyone tell me what's wrong with this picture?

Yes.......it's not already in the trash.

Perhaps a better question would be 'Whats right with this panel?'

 

[infinity]

Do you mean what's wrong besides the corrosion? You tell us.

 

[realolman]

O. K. I'm gullible. I'll bite.
Is this a service or what?

Where's the ground?

How'd all the rubble get in there?

What's the lump in the neutral... a splice?

22 wires and a 1" nipple probably only 10-12" long though.

no grounds?

WHAT?!?

I CAN'T TAKE IT ANYMORE !! WHAT"S WRONG!

 

[Minuteman]

Better fix it before Realolman pops a seam.

 

[M C Benzerari]

no thing wrong as long as it works.

 

[George Stolz]

I don't know what's wrong with the panel (besides age and abuse), but I do know what's wrong the picture - you shouldn't have knocked Joe Tedesco's tripod over to beat him to the shot.

 

[tallgirl]

Yes.......it's not already in the trash.

Heh. That's the correct answer

Perhaps a better question would be 'Whats right with this panel?'

Not a whole lot. But it does have grounds -- those are the blue-green wires hiding behind the neutrals.

 

[tallgirl]

I don't know what's wrong with the panel (besides age and abuse), but I do know what's wrong the picture - you shouldn't have knocked Joe Tedesco's tripod over to beat him to the shot.

It's not age or abuse -- it's being submerged in seawater for a month. The grounds are the blue-green wires behind the neutrals and the rubble is silt in the water that settled, then hardened after it dried out.

The panel to the left fed the same house -- on a separate meter. It had been a double that was converted to a single. Central A/C was added at some time in the past, along with who knows what else, I think some security lights or something. Everything that was added over the years went into the right hand panel, leaving the left hand panel the same as when it was built.

Do I send all these pictures to Joe whenever I take them?

 

[ceknight]

Can anyone tell me what's wrong with this picture?

I think the explanation can be found on the tailgate of this truck:

http://tirebiter.net/katrinad.jpg

 

[dlhoule]

Are the white wires on breakers feeding 220V for something? Should be 2P breakers even if new panel.

 

[don_resqcapt19]

Larry,

Are the white wires on breakers feeding 220V for something? Should be 2P breakers even if new panel.

The code does not require 2 pole breakers for a 240 volt load, but it does require handle ties. 240.20(B)(2).
Don

 

[tallgirl]

Are the white wires on breakers feeding 220V for something? Should be 2P breakers even if new panel.

I caught that when I was ripping the panel apart. It's hard to tell sometimes what goes or went where. There's often a lot of corrosion and dirt, and sometimes things caught fire before the water rose high enough to either put out the fire or the power was lost.

The only time I try and figure out what went where is when it's obvious that whatever came out of the box is what's going back in. In the case of this house we weren't sure if the house was still a double or if it had been completely converted into a single. Once we were sure it was really a single it didn't matter -- the panels hadn't conformed to anything resembling code in decades and all the circuits were going to have to be figured out from scratch.

If I knew this was some kind of photo contest that Joe would be interested in, I should have taken a photo of the FRONT of the house. Now that was scarey.

 

[al hildenbrand]

Thanks for the photo, Tallgirl.

I stayed looking at it for awhile, . . .I couldn't get past how good almost all the paint looked, yet the corrosion was so intense on what I take to be ferrous that was exposed.

At first I missed that this was a 3R enclosure.

Then I started thinking about ocean fogs and being in the salt air (being a landlocked Minnesotan, I can only imagine such things), but the stuff in the bottom of the panel. . .

What was that stuff? And then I figured out that the stuff on the top of the breakers was dried and cracked mud. . .and I remembered that you made an off hand comment about working on the devastation left by Katrina.

Revelation.

Very interesting photo. Lot of layers of understanding in it.

 

[tallgirl]

Al,

I couldn't understand what it was either at first because it's a very dense, very uniform rock-like substance. I was also surprised by the paint being in that condition. The water in that area was, I think, brackish as it came from both the Gulf and the Lake, neither of which are freshwater. The copper is corroded to some degree on all the wiring, but to a much greater degree on whatever was carrying a load when the levee broke -- that different kind of corrosion, or else burn marks, is how we can tell what was running when Katrina made a mess of things.

What was most interesting, to me, about that panel is that all the work in the house looked very professional. Meaning, it didn't look like someone went in there and wired up their own central air. And yet, there was a lot wrong with it that Katrina didn't cause. What we normally do is remove and replace whatever was there, rehabilitating the parts that need rehabilitating, replacing whatever can't be fixed, and working around whatever is broken and in the way.

For example, I invented a process that I used on one of the buildings I rewired that allowed us to preserve the conduit that was below the flood line (and when I say "invent" I mean "please don't ask me to explain it to you until after I submit preliminaries to the USPTO and can explain it with the words "patent pending" after it ...). That way we were able to chase down all the circuits that had been in that conduit, pull it out, and put several miles of THHN back in. But one piece of conduit had been clogged (we later determined it had been intentionally filled with cement during an earlier remodelling job ...), so we had to run conduit up and over, etc. to connect where things used to start to where they used to wind up.

But in the case of this house it was just WRONG and the people who'd worked on it -- this is the house the Navy electricians had spent time messing up -- before I got around to it hadn't made things better.

 

[joe tedesco]

Sad

Sad

Al,

I couldn't understand what it was either at first because it's a very dense, very uniform rock-like substance. I was also surprised by the paint being in that condition. The water in that area was, I think, brackish as it came from both the Gulf and the Lake, neither of which are freshwater. The copper is corroded to some degree on all the wiring, but to a much greater degree on whatever was carrying a load when the levee broke -- that different kind of corrosion, or else burn marks, is how we can tell what was running when Katrina made a mess of things.

What was most interesting, to me, about that panel is that all the work in the house looked very professional. Meaning, it didn't look like someone went in there and wired up their own central air. And yet, there was a lot wrong with it that Katrina didn't cause. What we normally do is remove and replace whatever was there, rehabilitating the parts that need rehabilitating, replacing whatever can't be fixed, and working around whatever is broken and in the way.

For example, I invented a process that I used on one of the buildings I rewired that allowed us to preserve the conduit that was below the flood line (and when I say "invent" I mean "please don't ask me to explain it to you until after I submit preliminaries to the USPTO and can explain it with the words "patent pending" after it ...). That way we were able to chase down all the circuits that had been in that conduit, pull it out, and put several miles of THHN back in. But one piece of conduit had been clogged (we later determined it had been intentionally filled with cement during an earlier remodelling job ...), so we had to run conduit up and over, etc. to connect where things used to start to where they used to wind up.

But in the case of this house it was just WRONG and the people who'd worked on it -- this is the house the Navy electricians had spent time messing up -- before I got around to it hadn't made things better.

With your permission, and with that same permission from the Mike Holt eyes and ears here, I will include this image, and others sent to me, in my column in the same EC&M publication that Mike and I write for, tallgil ~ that's a nice name, but I need more, or we can do anonymous too. I think that the sad part about the picture is that is was the result of a catastrophe, and I shall recognize it as such, but with the eyes of the eagles here, and maybe from mine too we can send a message.

 

[tallgirl]

With your permission, and with that same permission from the Mike Holt eyes and ears here, I will include this image, and others sent to me, in my column in the same EC&M publication that Mike and I write for, tallgil ~ that's a nice name, but I need more, or we can do anonymous too. I think that the sad part about the picture is that is was the result of a catastrophe, and I shall recognize it as such, but with the eyes of the eagles here, and maybe from mine too we can send a message.

I can send you the original JPEG. It's significantly larger than the image on Photobucket.

 

[joe tedesco]

Send to me

Send to me

OK, please send it, see my web address in my profile and look there for my web site and see my email address an send the image as high resolution along with your story and information.