Electrical Head Scratcher

Some of y'all have been in the situation where we need to tell somebody from another trade how to do their job. This is one of them. Come with me. Thank you. I was asked to come in here and look at this system. Oh, this looks like it's upside down. Oh nasty nasty Man, that return is not even remotely sealed. I think I have two filters in the van And if y'all can see outside this window, that's my package unit and um, Okay, all of these are turned on. I think first, one of these 100 amp breakers is for this. And it'll look like they're both on surge protector. Let's see if we have power or if we've lost low voltage. They've been doing some work in there. Actually, they just remodeled the whole place. This is the same place where we just installed a mini split. And I'm not going to call it a bonus room. It's kind of like an add-on that used to be a back porch. Okay, my meter turned on. I know we got power. At least one leg of power. We do. We got one leg of power. I'm gonna try to show that to you. They have disconnected one heat strip. That's what they've done. They've just disconnected one heat strip. So one of those other wires, you know what? I do have two power sources. It didn't look like that on the breaker, but I'm gonna show you what I found. It's up a little bit so y'all can see. It might be, both power sources might be like this. You see that? See, that's reading zero volts. But if I put my lead on ground, and touch either one of those I got 120 and that is the power coming in. all right y'all can't see the contactor right now but I'm gonna do the same thing. on both leads on both ends I got zero volts. put one to ground and 120. that means we're missing a leg somewhere. I just saw the mini split lit up it has 240 volts so I'm suspecting that breaker box we just looked at over here. have to um undo a few screws. Figure out which breaker is probably this one and see what's going on. That 11-in-1 Klein impact ready screwdriver. It's got the square bit we need for these. So I use it a lot and that does not want to come out. Okay, try to bring you all with me. I have 240 volts. So on this one, 240 volts. But that one goes the other way. This one goes up here to this. 240 volts. What? I know it now both of my power sources for the air conditioner are right here. They have they have them fed into one breaker you see there wait a minute come on that should be 248 volts all right let me 248 that's my breaker and just a second ago I was not getting 240 volts 248. Let's go back to the air conditioner. I had already closed this up all right we know I know both of those power sources come from the same place. Gotta get this where y'all can see. All right, here's one right here on the heat strips. I'm still getting zero volts. Should be in another one somewhere. There it is. That nut looks a little bit discolored, but the tape is, it doesn't look burnt. I should still have a connection. Yeah, that's got me scratching my head. Why would both of them be dead on one leg? I have an idea about that. Are going to do this again. I was thinking, you know, even if that, Just compromised somehow. It would have nothing to do with this right here. Both of my power supplies have one leg missing. You know sometimes when a breaker is under load it can fault like that but this is not a breaker problem. I mean not a load problem because it's not under load. It's not running 120 volts. Nothing. That's odd for both sides to be like Something like that, that is crazy. It's hard for y'all to see when I'm... Check in right here. These are my heat strips. I'm gonna do the same thing on these two power sources. Nothing but to ground 124 volts. That's the craziest thing. Okay this looks more or less new. I'm beginning to think they mixed up my wires right here. Let me call the owner real quick and ask if this has recently been replaced. It doesn't look like it has a whole lot of use so that might be my problem. Just figured out how to um if my theory that the wires are mixed up and i'm only getting power from basically if both legs of power if each one of these that one and that one have both legs on one side then i should have then i should have 240 volts between the two and we're about to see if i do turn that back all right this is one side and here's the other there's my 247 volts so that again look at there and i think all of these wires are the same size they're the same color yeah that's gonna be hard though i think the first thing we need to do is kill power and i got half of mine to kill that one too but i'm not going to let me just make sure this does not have power i got shocked the other day and i'm a little bit scared nothing nothing okay we're good okay this is one side okay we're gonna leave that one in there right now we're gonna take one of these I got to be real quick, for all of that in there is basically hot with no breaker. So you got unlimited amperage, possibly. Okay, that one might have been a little bit shorter, so we're going to move. The electrician did not do me any favors, whoever installed this. I can't see because these great big old wires are right there. There we go. Uh-oh, I don't want it coming out. Not even in there. Let me get my needle nose over here. I think I got it. If y'all are shaking, I'll tighten this up in just a second. Okay. So one of the thicker ones, this is, I'm still hesitant to touch this. That's a six wire gauge. And one way to know if I got it right, it's either going to work or it's not. Hope I don't blow anything up. Let me back out that screw just a little bit more. These hundred amp breakers are expensive. All right. That one's in there. That one just went in. Set this down. All right. Stand back. I didn't hear anything crackling. I'm going to try this again. First, I'm going to try over over here on these heat strips. Oh look at that I got 245 volts and 247. If everything is as it was before that thermostat should be lit up. That should kind of get them up and going for now but I'm going to recommend to this customer that maybe he have his electrician come back give us two breakers maybe maybe something like a 60 and a 40 instead of one breaker with two circuits on it. Whatever electrician did this that's kind of halfway doing it in my opinion. Tell me what you think. And as you see, it's now lit up. I hope y'all enjoyed that video. I think if I didn't mention it, I did recommend to this customer that we put in two breakers instead of one, the way it's wired. If you're gonna have one breaker, you need one circuit and it's just not done properly. And I think that's why he made the second mistake. I hope you enjoyed the video. If you did, how about like and subscribe and I'll catch you on the next one.