The correct answer to my problem is probably ‘call an electrician’ but maybe somebody can steer me in the right direction. Big thunderstorm last night, close lightning strike, blew out TV cable box even though it was on a surge protector and took out one phone line. The goofy part is the power to my garage. Garage is about 75 feet from the house, fed by overhead wires, has its own panel box with a circuit breaker in the house panel for that line, house power is OK. Panel in the garage has 7 circuits. Go into the garage this AM, no inside lights or receptacles , all circuit breakers OK and have power to buzz-box welder and outside floodlights. 3 of the breakers test as ‘dead’ – no power out of them even though they are on. Further testing shows that if I flip ‘good’ breakers off, the ‘dead’ ones will come on, but sometimes at what seems to be half-power (lights are dim, my fan runs slow). If I turn off all the ‘good’ breakers the ‘dead’ ones seem to work OK. I’m thinking some sort of grounding problem – could the breaker panel box be bad??
Call an electricity expert. There should be two hots into the panel. Sounds like 1 of them is comprised and the back feeding issue causes concern. Shut the power off feeding the overhead lines and call an electrician.
Leave your power 'off'. get an electrician in there to check and you need to look at the cable jackets. In a previous life i was an electrician and one company i worked for a company that did insurance & fire restoration. I saw a ton of lightening damage. I can ruin your individual conductors that are inside the cable especially wherever there is a staple. It all happens in a millisecond and the heat is too intense to imagine - i've seen it shrink the trusses so quick that the drywall nails will pop out where the lightening passes - there'll be a row of them sticking down thru the ceiling and the electrical cable will be just above them. I've seen the jacket have a little pin hole at each staple and when you open the jacket the insulation on the individual wires will fall apart. It all depends on how far away the lightening hit. The big obvious stuff anybody can catch, melted ground connector at the ground rod; signs of extreme heat inside the panel; lightbulbs blown apart and layin inside the globes etc that is the stuff anybody can see, it is the cable damage i would worry about.
A now famous quote from the late Andy Griffith acting the part of Andy Taylor,,"Call the man",,"just call the man". HRP
3 out of 3 responses say 'call an electrician' - confirming what I thought.... Power is off Thanks guys
Sounds like you've lost 1/2 of your 220 service. I'm guessing the dim lights are when something 220 is on.
Ok My advice ,But be careful ,Set continuity meter on 600 volts,After you remove panel cover.Should be 2 large wires which are 110 a peice and at the bottom Theres a ground ing bar,Hold the red wire to the one and the black wire to the ground,Just be carefulnot to touch a thing Each bar at the top should be 110
You are lucky you still have some wires left in the building. I was called in to rewire a house that took a direct hit once. There was absolutely no wire left in the house. Every last inch had been vaporized.
First check the ground rod. If that doesn't do it, and there are no obviously burnt connections,or fried breakers, "call the man".
It sounds like you lost the neutral that would be connected to the ground in the house panel. Your welder is likely a 220 volt unit and it doesn't need the neutral.
My buddies house took a hit and it turned the buried coax TV cable into Det cord. Left a trench all the way through the yard.
A 240 double pole circuit that is connected and turned on will back feed the leg that is out.. They are not supposed to do this & a cause for concern if that is what's happening. There should be no crossing or interconnection of the two legs.
I agree with others posted....call a professional rather than burn down the garage. Oner thng to keep in mind is homeowners insurance. I had about $3000 in appliance and wiring damage from an electrical storm years ago....called the homeowners (Erie insurance) THEY INSISTED on getting a prfessional of my choice to inspect...estimate and covered $3300 in inspection and repairs no questions asked
They can backfeed to a neutral on the opposite leg. There might be a ground rod on the garage service panel but it won't be the same as the neutral from the power company hence the dim lights.
There is no neutral in 220 circuit, ever. The neutral and ground are cross bonded in the panel and there should be continuity between those two. If there is any backfeeding across legs or of power thru the neutral there are problems.
That is exactley what happened to my BRAND NEW HOME of 2 weeks - hadn't even made one mortgage payment yet. The "Bolt" hit my galvanized furnace pipe vent in the roof of my new home and sent the vent flying into the back yard and the "bolt" continued through the house in all my galvanized air vents, appliances - you name it - blew GFI swiches out of the walls and then out to the ground rod outside, Vaporized every wire, BUT AMAZINGLY - no fire. Holy shit. The TV cable company came days earlier to hook my cable up and the cable wire hadn't been buried in the yard yet and was laying right next to my ground rod into the house. The "Bolt" jumped to the cable and followed it to the cable box back in the corner of the property and BLEW IT UP into many pieces. BOTH neighbors houses on each side of me that were being built, their garage door openers got fried as well as some small appliances. Their insurance companies didn't cover repairs because it was a "Act of God" as their insurnace company papers stated it was a "power surge". ( ya think?) My insurance company repaired everything because my damage was a "Direct" Act of God". Ya thaink ? No Shit. The power company turned off the power at the street to all three houses until electricians came in to repair things after all the electrical damage. The lightning bolt that hit our house was the size of a half dollar as the furnace pipe cap that blew off our house had a black seered mark the size of a half dollar. It's not the electricity man... can you imagine the AMPS in a half dollar size lighting bolt ? Glad obviously - NO FIRE but now I won't win the Powerball lottery as the odds to get hit by lighting are far better than winning the lottery. DONT SCREW WITH IT MAN - it's a fire waiting to happen. CALL A PROFESSIONAL ELECTRICIAN ! Good luck.
A month after building my shop, it got hit by lightning. Right through the tin roof, charred the truss that was right in line with it. Blew the meter. When the electric Co. came out, the guy said he was surprise i had the main turned off and if i didn't my whole shop would have been gone. I wasn't done wiring it yet, so I was turning the main off at night. On closer inspection we found that all the tin on the meter side was burnt off around every nail.
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