JHundley35
DIY
Good evening all.
My wife and I recently bought a house and our inspector missed some major electrical issues that I am now trying to diagnose. I'm hoping that someone might be able to shed some light on this situation.
So we initially noticed that we had around 12 outlets not working in the house, 2 on the main level were reading 50V, a switch that powered 4 of them in the living room that did not work, and a light switch in the laundry room the kicked the breaker everytime we flipped it on.
We started our investigation on the two outlets reading 50V, which were side by side. We discovered that the one on the right was cross wired. We corrected this and the one on the left started reading .02V. We were able to trace the left outlet down the basement, through the drop ceiling over to a junction box, which had 4 disconnected wires and 4 connected wires, one of the disconnected was hot and from what I can see, none of the connected ones were hot. We traced two of these disconnected wires up to the switch that didn't work and saw the other two that weren't connected ran to the outlet that dropped from 50V to .02V (We used an OHM meter to verify both sets of wires ran to the respected areas.)
The house has older wiring which is hard to tell what's neutral and what's hot, which we believe that whoever wired the house had the same issue and just guessed on some of the receptacles. We were able to isolate the hots and neutrals in the junction box and connect them, which powered the switch and outlets in the living room correctly. However, when we did this, it has now caused our lights in our kitchen and dining room to stop working.
Now, one would assume that if a junction box has 8 wires that 4 would be neutral and 4 would be hot. So could we have accidently wired a hot and neutral backwards, or could there possibly be 6 neutrals and 2 hots/5 neutrals 3 hots etc.? We pulled a switch to one of the non working lights off to check and there is no power running to it. Would disconnecting 4 neutrals in that junction box cause power to completely disappear on the light switches?
Sorry for the lengthy post. It's been a headache trying to make headway with this.
My wife and I recently bought a house and our inspector missed some major electrical issues that I am now trying to diagnose. I'm hoping that someone might be able to shed some light on this situation.
So we initially noticed that we had around 12 outlets not working in the house, 2 on the main level were reading 50V, a switch that powered 4 of them in the living room that did not work, and a light switch in the laundry room the kicked the breaker everytime we flipped it on.
We started our investigation on the two outlets reading 50V, which were side by side. We discovered that the one on the right was cross wired. We corrected this and the one on the left started reading .02V. We were able to trace the left outlet down the basement, through the drop ceiling over to a junction box, which had 4 disconnected wires and 4 connected wires, one of the disconnected was hot and from what I can see, none of the connected ones were hot. We traced two of these disconnected wires up to the switch that didn't work and saw the other two that weren't connected ran to the outlet that dropped from 50V to .02V (We used an OHM meter to verify both sets of wires ran to the respected areas.)
The house has older wiring which is hard to tell what's neutral and what's hot, which we believe that whoever wired the house had the same issue and just guessed on some of the receptacles. We were able to isolate the hots and neutrals in the junction box and connect them, which powered the switch and outlets in the living room correctly. However, when we did this, it has now caused our lights in our kitchen and dining room to stop working.
Now, one would assume that if a junction box has 8 wires that 4 would be neutral and 4 would be hot. So could we have accidently wired a hot and neutral backwards, or could there possibly be 6 neutrals and 2 hots/5 neutrals 3 hots etc.? We pulled a switch to one of the non working lights off to check and there is no power running to it. Would disconnecting 4 neutrals in that junction box cause power to completely disappear on the light switches?
Sorry for the lengthy post. It's been a headache trying to make headway with this.
