Electrical – Panel breakers are alternately 90 V and 140 V

electrical-panel

Everything in the house is acting up. The fridge has melted ice, the radio is acting strange, etc.

I multimetered the panel box and each breaker is either 90 V or 140 V alternately.
I have a plan to upgrade the box from 100 A to 200 A as the meter shows the system is set for 200 A. But meanwhile everything is acting up.

Best Answer

Call the power company NOW and report a power outage

The fact that you've worked on your panel is unrelated. Given the testing you just did and the results you got -- you have a power outage at the meter pan or before. It could be where the neutral service wire connects to your neutral bar, but that's the only place it could be on your side, and super easy to check.

To be more precise, the type of outage is a "Lost Neutral".

Loss of a supply wire at or before the meter pan is a power outage.

If the dead supply wire is a hot, half your panel will work. If the dead supply wire is a neutral, your 240V loads will work and your 120V loads will have scary weird voltages on them.

It's still a power outage and should be treated as such.

As long as you are confident in the quality of the connection between your neutral service wire and your neutral bus, you should button up the panel and there's no reason to show it to the power company. Everything they'll care about will be at the meter pan or their side of it.

DON'T procrastinate this or try to work around it by balancing loads etc.

Seriously, unless you plan to shimmy up a pole with a set of Allen sockets, every possible path ends with you calling the power company and them fixing their service-drop issue. Which they will do for free, same-day and probably 10 minutes up on the pole. And then you'll be like "darn it Harper, why didn't you lead with 'Call the power company', why send me in circles doing all that other stuff first?"