The voltage in the house that my friend rents in peculiar. At times the lights will dim and brighten seemingly on their own. The brightness may also change when other lights are turned on or off, if the fridge door is opened, etc. The house is small, with a well pump, water heater, 2 bedroom, kitchen, living room, 1 bathroom, outside lights, etc. The landlord%26#039;s house operates off the same transformer, and he has no problems. An electrician checked it out and found that when the voltage drops on one pole, the other increases, and vice versa. No matter what the sum of the poles is about 248. Each pole had the same number of single pole breakers, but the electrician moved them so all single pole breaker are on one pole, and the problem is still there. They also saw the same problems when they tried different combinations of unplugging the fridge, unscrewing light bulbs, shutting breakers off, etc. f%26#039;d like to use my ohmmeters and lengths of wire to check the continuity of ground, neutral, and hot lines between different outlets and light fixtures when the main breaker is off. It seems to me that there%26#039;s a problem with a ground and/or neutral line somewhere, but I%26#039;m not sure where. Maybe somwhere the neutral and hot lines are switched. Any ideas about what could cause this?|||Good observation on your part about the ground. That sounds like a good place to start. Some houses use aluminum wire from the panel to the grounding rod outside or to a city water line going thru the ground and those connections get loose after a while from the wire expanding and contracting all the time. Do a pure copper connection from your panel to the ground source
I would just pound in a new copper 8-10 foot ground rod outside or make a new clean connection on your water line (grounding rod is better I think, especially if you can find a %26quot;wetter%26quot; area )
Most houses now require 2 grounding sources set a certain distance apart. So put in a new ground rod and connect it up to the main panel and try that. If you have really dry soil in your area, use the longest rod you can find. If the soil gets really dry, it%26#039;s not a very good ground.
The other thing I would check is to see if the house is wired anywhere with aluminum wire. Aluminum is good, but it has a tendency to get loose at the connection points and get a layer of oxide that causes higher resistance. If you have that wire, just sand off the ends a little and put some dielectric grease on there to help stop oxidation and retighten connections
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If it isn%26#039;t the ground being bad, it could be the wires going from the electric meter to the main panel. If the wires are loose inside the electric meter that go to your panel, that dimming could be caused by arcing in the loose connections. Dimming in general is caused by either broken wires or loose connections or bad grounds, so it has to be one of the three if the other house is fine and comes from the same transformer.
You should get permission from your electric company to remove the meter cover and look at those connectors and also recheck the main fuse entry into the panel|||There is not enough power going into your house.
