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Got stuck for a full day on a weird voltage drop in a 100-year-old house
Had a job last week in an old brick house downtown, putting in a new panel and some door contacts. Everything was fine until I powered up the main board and got a weird low voltage reading on one of the zone loops. Figured it was a bad connection, so I started checking all my terminations. Two hours later, still nothing. Ended up tracing every inch of that 22/4 run, which was buried in plaster and lathe walls. Turns out, about six feet back from the contact, the previous installer from like the 90s had done a spice and just wrapped it with electrical tape that had completely degraded. The copper was green and crusty, causing a massive resistance spike. What should have been a 30-minute fix turned into an 8-hour hunt. Anyone else run into these ghost voltage issues in old renovations where you just have to find the one bad spot?
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the_claire7mo ago
Ever have a buddy chase a flickering light for days? My friend did that in a 1920s bungalow, only to find a rat had chewed the insulation off a wire inside a wall. It's crazy how one tiny hidden flaw can eat up your whole day.
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paige3317mo ago
Ugh, that's the worst. Those hidden splices in old walls are absolute time vampires. You can check everything you just did ten times and it still points to a ghost in the system. It's never the obvious spot, it's always some janky fix from thirty years ago buried behind solid plaster. So much for a simple panel swap.
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the_drew7mo ago
Last year I traced a dead outlet for three hours in my own house. Finally found a hidden junction box behind the kitchen backsplash, wrapped in ancient cloth tape. @the_claire, that rat story is too real, sometimes the fix is just as weird. I keep a cheap borescope in my tool bag now for exactly that kind of wall ghost.
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jason_lewis37mo ago
Remember that flickering porch light my neighbor couldn't fix? Turned out a squirrel had stashed nuts in the outdoor fixture box and the shells were shorting the terminals. Just a pile of acorns causing all that trouble.
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