A friend's service panel is getting power from somewhere, but their power is shut off. They're in the process of getting a voltage detector and trying to use that to figure it out but they're super new at this.
In the meantime, if anyone has thoughts on where to look or how to tell where the power could be coming from, we'd love some suggestions.
All I was able to tell them so far is figure out if the mains are hot or not.
UPDATE:
To answer the question below, yes it is single family. I don't think anyone else uses it? I hope? I tried having him turn them off one by one. That seemed to show that all the power was coming from the one left main, but then we ended up going round and round still seeming to find contraindications to that answer.
Eventually he just took the whole thing apart and put it back together without the water heater, just treating it as if it's only getting 110V service. That seems to be working for now. Occam's razor, probably power is coming from that one left main. Assuming maybe the electric company person only turned off one of the mains instead of both on accident?
Wondering if there's anything else that we could be missing? Things still seem to defy sense. He says that the hot breakers are not alternating, they're consecutive. So the left main seems to be serving the entire right side of the panel instead of every other one. Could there be damage to the panel itself? Also seems like the 200A main breaker might not be stopping power to the hot bus, so that's concerning. Just another thing that seems super weird.
So the above part was just a miscommunication — they do alternate like normal and the 200A breaker does turn off the whole thing. My bad– one more mystery solved.
Best Answer
You will just need to shut off breakers to isolate each wire and check it for voltage.
Turn the main breaker off, and check the incoming lugs for voltage. If present, then the power has not been "shut off". With the breaker still off, check the lugs that attach to the sliver bars in the back of the panel.
If there is voltage on the bars, one of the breakers is "back feeding" voltage. Turn the breakers off one at a time to see which breaker it is coming from.