Electrical Problem Solved!

As the title shows, we found the illusive electrical nightmare. When I left you last, we weren't sure exactly what had caused our mysterious 'hole in the pipe', which actually occured in two pipes. Ironically, some other problems started popping up. People getting shocked while touching appliances, touching screws on light switch plates, and best of all...when turning the faucet IN THE SHOWER! I don't know how he didn't get killed, but a man on the second floor actually was shocked, and almost couldn't let go, while in the shower turning the faucet.

Some volunteers came down for the weekend to do some work and one of them offered to find the problem and correct it. I had not had time to work on it at that point, and didn't know about anybody else getting shocked. The only thing I knew then was that the same room with the water problem also had some electrical issues. Nobody had said anything else about it. Well, when he was investigating, that's when he found out that the man had been shocked and that other things were hot. Mostly, metal that was supposed to be grounded was reading about 48V. No big deal. Not good, but shouldn't kill anybody.

The problem was though that if you happened to touch two of the 48V items at the same time (like a pipe or water, and an outlet screw for example) you'd get the full 110V! That was definately bad.

Well, he said he would not leave until it was done. That was Saturday afternoon. Monday afternoon he decided that he would put everything back like it was and give up. I had busied myself with other projects since he was working on it, but when I learned of his discouragement, I decided I'd better help. This place is big. Real big. And nothing is put together the way you might expect. In addition, there isn't really anybody around that knows much about it. There are about 12 breaker boxes that I know of. Here was my strategy:

1) Shut off every single breaker in the building.
2) Starting at the main, turn on each breaker and test the condition.
3) When the condition returns, you've now found the faulty circuit.

Well, this worked out well. We shut everything down and tested. No current. We shut the main on. Still no current. About the third breaker (fortunately there was a main panel downstairs and that was where the problem was, or this could have taken a very long time) all of a sudden the current on the ground reappeared. We traced this to a single cable that ran to an out of service meter.

The cable appeared to go up the pole and enter the meter box from the top. This was however, an illusion. There was a small hole in the top of the box, but only one of the wires in the cable actually went into the hole. And it only went in a little. You see, there was enough bare wire exposed that someone the cable had gotten thrown or laid on top of the box and arc welded itself to the box! The wires were hot, so when they touched the grounded box, ZAP! Once we removed it, the current upstairs was gone. This single cable lit everything up. Now we could safely shower, or touch the faucet AND the stove at the same time, or reach our hand in the washing machine and test the water.

With that mystery solved, I'm hopefully going to be moving on to other things, like updating my blog more regularly. I'm going to try to start tracking projects and taking pictures. To start with, my next entry will feature some detailed photos of the whole place.

Adios muchachos!