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Electrically savvy folks, does the bottom wire look corroded to you? (slrpnk.net)
submitted 11 months ago by to c/diy@beehaw.org
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I’m in an apt. and the power has been shutting off lately. It doesn’t trip any of the breakers in the breaker box inside the apt. but it does trip the master breaker on the box outside. Thought it was an oven issue but it still happens with the oven breaker off.

Visual inspection of the breaker box outside shows one of the wires looks a bit corroded. Wires to/from the rest of the units are a nice copper color. Is that a red flag?

Landlord is dragging their feet and telling us to talk to the electric company, and electric company is saying to call a licensed electrician, so I’m just trying to understand the issue so hopefully the landlord will listen to me.

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[–] 7 points 11 months ago (4 children)

Does that 50amp breaker serve your whole apartment? And then you have a sub panel with a bunch of circuits of 15amp breakers and maybe a dryer or oven 30-40 amp breaker? Most likely the various things you have plugged in, plus oven are not tripping their own circuit, but overall total draw is more than 50 amps the main can handle

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  • [–] [S] 5 points 11 months ago (3 children)

    Yeah that one feeds my 1 bedroom apt. This is the inside panel. The oven one takes up two slots that are tied together then 3 smaller circuits for the two rooms (including fridge) and lights. No washer, dryer, air, water heater, or heater involved.

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  • [–] 5 points 11 months ago* (2 children)

    It would be the landlord needing to call an electrician in, nothing to do with the electric company (at this stage). Here if a landlord is failing to act we can call in a professional and withold the service fee from the rent.

    The inner panel with the oven and other 3 circuits has a total of 100amps, compared to the outside panel only handling 50amps. So you could run enough stuff that wouldn't trip the inner panel, but the outside is overloaded.

    But it doesn't preclude a short or some other situation either, like a faulty breaker inside, that should be tripping but isn't.

    For safety you need to have an electrician come in.

    When does it trip? What things are running when it happens?

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  • [–] [S] 4 points 11 months ago* (1 child)

    We’ve managed to trigger the main to flip 4 times—none on purpose.

    First the main oven was clearly the trigger leading me to suspect a bad heating element.

    Second one was the same scenario.

    Third one was a single burner on the stovetop (no oven).

    Then I turned off the oven breaker inside assuming oven needed repair.

    Fourth time no kitchen appliances being actively used and stove/oven breaker is off. The items being actively used were the fridge, two medium sized tv monitors, an xbox one x, and a pc tower. Each setup plugged into a different circuit. I remember commenting that the xbox sounded like it was working hard soon before the outage. Xbox and one monitor were on one circuit and PC and the other monitor on the another circuit.

    So yeah it does sound like we’re managing to trip the main breaker without tripping any of the sub panel breakers by running enough devices at once even if they’re on different circuits in the apt.

    we’ve lived here a long time so the fact that this is and issue now and wasn’t in the past points to some element deteriorating whether it be circuitry itself or one of our devices. If one of the devices had a full short the inside breaker should trip? But maybe another malfunction that doesn’t quite amount to a short?

    A PC and an Xbox shouldn’t combine to overload 50A, especially when they’re protected by a 15 and 20A breaker respectively (not enough to overload 50) so something is definitely not right.

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