Job in a basement last Tuesday turned into a disaster

Panel was labeled wrong on 6 different breakers, spent two hours tracing circuits that shoulda taken 20 minutes. Found out the last guy used white tape on every neutral instead of paint markers. Anyone else run into panels where the labeling is just completely useless?

3 comments

3 Comments

martinez.paul16d ago

Had a similar mess last year in a 1970s office building. Someone used red tape on all the neutrals in one subpanel, but the other panels in the same room had black tape on them. Spent a whole afternoon trying to figure out why a circuit kept tripping, turns out a neutral was landed on ground bar. The worst part was the panel schedule was hand written in pencil and half the labels were faded. I started carrying a sharpie and those little label stickers just to fix stuff as I find it now. It's wild how often people skip the simple stuff like proper labeling.

jana50916d ago

Wait, you sure that was a neutral on the ground bar and not just a shared neutral that got landed wrong? I’ve seen that happen more times than I can count.

park.aaron15d ago

Man that hand written pencil schedule thing hit too close to home... found a subpanel in a hardware store once where someone used white paint marker on the breakers themselves and it was all smeared from years of dust and grime. Ended up tracing every single circuit with a toner just to figure out what went where. The neutral on the ground bar thing is so common it's almost routine now when I open up older panels.