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Pro tip: almost lost a neutral on a panel swap in a 1950s house, now I tag everything
Was doing a panel swap in an old house off Maple Street about two weekends back, and the place had cloth wiring with no ground. I killed the main and started pulling old breakers, and there were like 6 white wires just bundled together on the neutral bar with no labels at all. I set my meter to continuity and rang out each one before touching anything, and two of them turned out to be hots fed from somewhere else. Turns out an old water heater circuit had been tapped off downstream and someone used white wire for it, which is how you get lit up when you think you're working a neutral. I tagged every wire with tape and a marker before I moved the first one, and the swap went clean. Anybody got a system for marking wires in cramped old panels where the labels keep falling off?
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kim_davis7d ago
Six white wires bundled with no labels in a 1950s panel is my actual nightmare, and the fact that two were hots from a tapped water heater circuit proves why. Backfeeding a water heater off a downstream tap and using white wire for it is the kind of stuff that gets somebody hurt, so good on you for ringing out every single one before you touched it. Solid move tagging everything with tape and marker first, that's the only reason that swap went clean.
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