Reply to thread

Message

<blockquote data-quote="Tom Manchester" data-source="post: 780" data-attributes="member: 82">Today I was doing some maintenance at my shop and decided it would be a good idea to map out all the circuits on the electrical panel. So I went into the bathroom and pulled the cover off of the hot water heater. Then I put my meter probes on the incoming power so I could tell when I found the right breaker. I *thought* the hot water heater was wired at 240V, so I measured between the grounding screw and the white wire to see if I was getting 120V. Oddly though, it was at 26v. I measured between the hot and the grounding screw and it was 125V, so that looked normal. I thought maybe there was a bad breaker, so I decided to dig into the panel some more.So upon opening the panel I traced the wiring from what I had determined to be the hot water heater breaker and confirmed that it was not wired at 240, but instead wired at 120. That made sense, but why was I getting 26v from neutral to ground? Coming into the panel is a single phase feed from the meter bank outside. It has 4 wires, 2 hots, a neutral, and a ground. Hot to Hot measures ~250V, a bit high but not insane. Each hot to each neutral yields about 125 volts, so the neutral seems to be intact. Here&#039;s the kicker though, Neutral to Ground (they are not bonded in my panel) measures 26VAC! I went outside to the meter bank on the side of the building to investigate and I could not seem to locate a grounding rod from the meter bank panel. Where is the mystery 26v coming from?</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Tom Manchester, post: 780, member: 82"] Today I was doing some maintenance at my shop and decided it would be a good idea to map out all the circuits on the electrical panel. So I went into the bathroom and pulled the cover off of the hot water heater. Then I put my meter probes on the incoming power so I could tell when I found the right breaker. I *thought* the hot water heater was wired at 240V, so I measured between the grounding screw and the white wire to see if I was getting 120V. Oddly though, it was at 26v. I measured between the hot and the grounding screw and it was 125V, so that looked normal. I thought maybe there was a bad breaker, so I decided to dig into the panel some more. So upon opening the panel I traced the wiring from what I had determined to be the hot water heater breaker and confirmed that it was not wired at 240, but instead wired at 120. That made sense, but why was I getting 26v from neutral to ground? Coming into the panel is a single phase feed from the meter bank outside. It has 4 wires, 2 hots, a neutral, and a ground. Hot to Hot measures ~250V, a bit high but not insane. Each hot to each neutral yields about 125 volts, so the neutral seems to be intact. Here's the kicker though, Neutral to Ground (they are not bonded in my panel) measures 26VAC! I went outside to the meter bank on the side of the building to investigate and I could not seem to locate a grounding rod from the meter bank panel. Where is the mystery 26v coming from? [/QUOTE]

Verification