Spent three hours chasing a phantom voltage in an old house panel.

I was adding a circuit in a 1950s home and kept reading 50 volts on a line that should have been dead. Turns out, a shared neutral from a multi-wire branch circuit on the other side of the house was back-feeding through the old cloth wiring. Has anyone else run into this with knob and tube upgrades?

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2 Comments

noah_singh815mo ago

Ugh, classic. Gotta check for those shared neutrals first.

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taylor_hall5mo ago

Feel your pain, that's a brutal way to lose half a day. @noah_singh81 is right, those shared neutrals are the first thing I look for now in old places. I've traced phantom voltage back to a buried junction box someone drywalled over before.

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