We redid our bathrooms and had an electrician come in and put in new wiring for outlets, heater/fan/lights and heated floors. He had to replace the electrical panel, because the house is older (1956) and didn't have enough space to accomplish the task. So he installed a new electrical panel. Everything was fine for a while.
Then the lights started to flicker and electronic devices started to pop on and off.
Then 1/2 the house started to lose power. No breakers were tripped.
We called the electrician and he said the power loss was probably coming from the pole and to call in the power company to check the line.
Power company came out, checked the line and determined it's something in my house that's causing the outage.
Since then the power has gone out for up to 24 hours at a time. Flickering lights signal the outage. Now being an old house they have most of the lights along one line. Dining room light, kitchen fan light and several outlets in our bedroom are on the same line (it's a ranch) on one side of the house, the other side has multiple fixtures and outlets as well. I went down to the electrical panel (surprise nothing labeled) to see which circuit breaker was causing the problem. Went up and down both sides of the panel, but not once did the lights or outlets go out. Finally I turned off one side of the panel (left) and then started to turn on breakers one at a time and discovered 2 separate breakers 6 down from each other combined, turn off the power to the lights and outlets along this line.
Now with the old box, no problems, electric did not flicker, nor did only 1/2 the house lose power.
Question, what did the electrician do and is it safe to be on 2 breakers like that until he can come out and look at the problem?
Thanks
Best Answer
Did the electrician replaced the Service panel only, or (s)he also worked on other things like adding junction boxes and ran new conduits? The problem of 2 breakers (let's call #1 and #7 connected to the same circuit (lights in this case) might not be at the Service panel, but it could be that he had mistakenly connected wire from #7 to the existing light circuit which already had been connected to #1 prior to this, at the new junction box. You need to trace down where the old lighting circuit connected to those #1 and #7 wires.