220 Breaker / 110 Circuit

Disclaimer: I am NOT an electrician, but I did just have my panel redone and I do have an Electrical Engineering degree. But still, take everything I say with a bit of a grain of salt as it is all based on my recent research and experience. Hopefully a licensed electrician can chime in. Getting a picture with the front panel removed so we can see the wiring to the breakers may help as well.

Some of these are clearly meant to be 220V circuits, like the Stove. I don't know why one of the breakers is labeled both KIT (presumably kitchen) and Oven. The oven should be 220V as well UNLESS you don't have an electric oven. Which of your appliances are electric and which are gas?

Beyond that, I have a feeling you have a lot of Multiwire Branch Circuits (MWBCs) in the house. In this case, the two sides of the 220V breaker are used independently for 110V circuits and they share a neutral. I had one of these in my panel and it was horribly miswired in the old panel and my electrician fixed it in the new panel. The two sides need to be on a common trip so that if either side overloads, both turn off (due to sharing the neutral). My old panel had them not on a common trip AND they were both on the same phase which is really bad as it can overload the neutral.

You could probably validate this by tracing the wires that go into a given 2 pole breaker (like the backyard/flat breaker) and see if they wind up in one cable with 4 wires (2 hots, a neutral and a ground). Although 60 amps seems kinda ridiculous for that and you'd need huge wire to support a 60A breaker - is that one maybe feeding a subpanel?

pythonrsas said:

Hello Experts,

I had an electrician visit my place for some repairs and when looked at my recently installed main panel (photo attached) he said that the panel is not setup correctly. He said that 220V breakers are connected to 110V circuits within the house. Could someone explain what the implications of this are and if this is something that needs to be rectified ASAP. There were city inspectors who came to inspect who did not raise any flags also. Thanks for the advice in advance.

P.S. - the ones that are not labelled are connected to other sub circuits, they are just not labelled yet.

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You are right from the garage on down is a simple 120ac single pole breakers. I’m shocked that the inspector failed to catch that since he read the same labeling that I did and all the breakers being double pole breakers should have caught his attention. It’s easily fixed either by taking the connectors off the double pole or replacing them with single pole breakers. The biggest problem is if a breaker which is connected to another breaker has a fault then the breaker without a fault might not let it trip. That’s bizarre and shame on the inspector